ABSTRACT
Pound's idea of the ideogram and an ideogrammic poetry can be traced back to about 1916, some time considerably after he had acquired the Fenollosa manuscripts. Indeed the whole notion of the ideogram took shape in Pound along with his experimentation with and advocacy of Vorticist principles in poetry and the arts in general. The chapter provides an appropriate context in which both Fenollosa's and Pound's claims regarding the Chinese ideogram, as well as those of Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell, can be properly assessed and understood. The case of Ayscough and Lowell is again relevant and instructive. At about the same time when Pound was editing Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese character, Ayscough and Lowell were also making their discovery about the nature of Chinese poetry. It can be safely assumed that at the time of their own discovery of the pictographic roots and components of Chinese characters, neither of them had read Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese character.
