ABSTRACT
Ezra Pound, the author of the polylingual Cantos, and C.K. Ogden, the creator of Basic English, a language designed to operate on a vocabulary of 850 words, are not natural bedfellows. For a period in the 1930s, however, their projects aligned. In this chapter, I explore the utopian gestures behind their respective projects and, by looking at their correspondence, I argue that their theories of language were remarkably close, for a time, at least. The grounds on which I draw a correspondence between Pound’s theory of language and Ogden’s are that both share a conviction towards the value of definition. In fact, my claim is that definition, rather than semiotics, is at the centre of both of their theories of language. The Flaubertian mot juste outlined in the introduction had been transformed, by 1935, into a principle of poetic definition, and it is here that Pound’s fascism, his Confucianism, and his ideogrammic method all come together.
