ABSTRACT
The idea of Chinese poetry as essentially a kind of vers libre or free verse readily found its way into the heart of the Imagist imagination. The exclusion of rhyme by tacit consensus among a group of young poets and translators at the beginning of the twentieth-century had important consequences for the polemic behind the movement of vers libre, not least in English translations from Chinese poetry. Pound's chance encounter with Fenollosa's Chinese and Japanese work was thus for Pound both timely and invigorating, and in time Pound had set an example with his versions of Cathay in unrhymed vers libre. Waley clearly recognized that vers libre and its unrhymed rhythms were the modern thing, not the rhyming iambics or dactylics of the late Victorians or contemporary Edwardians, so that the reasons for discarding rhyme offered by Waley himself were certainly not the only or decisive reasons.
