ABSTRACT
Ernest Fenollosa was the greatest influence on Pound’s language and poetics during the middle period of his career. Much of Pound’s later writing on language, as well as the form of his poetics, can be traced to Pound’s work on Fenollosa’s posthumous notes. Pound’s ‘collaboration’ with Fenollosa has been the source of some of his most celebrated poetry and some of his most controversial critical writing. Most notably, Fenollosa’s and Pound’s erroneous understanding of the Chinese written character led to a broad understanding of their position as an insistence that Chinese characters are stylised depictions of natural processes. This, I argue, is a vast oversimplification of their argument, however. By comparing Fenollosa’s and Pound’s work to contemporaneous ideas in phenomenology, we can see that their arguments are slightly more subtle. In this chapter, I argue that Fenollosa, in fact, represents a crucial confirmation of Pound’s long-held ideas on the relationship between language, thought, and reality. Pound’s and Fenollosa’s arguments are, I demonstrate, in fact, part of a sophisticated way of understanding language as intentionality, as a directedness towards objects apprehended in the mind. By grounding my discussion in the relationship between language and mental apprehension, I argue that we can revise our understanding of Pound’s and Fenollosa’s arguments, and thus see them as quintessentially modern.
