[In the following essay, originally published in 1964, Stock reviews how writer Ernest Fenollosa and Chinese poetic methods influenced Pound's poetic style and philosophy of writing.]

The best and bulk of Pound's literary prose was written before 1920. Whatever shortcomings it may have, it was written by one who was interested not only in what he was writing about, but the literary world in which he was working as well. The later prose, even the best of it, even essays like ‘How to read’, ‘Date Line’ and those on Monro and Housman, lack the freshness of the earlier pieces, despite the chatty and occasionally effective style; but more than that, they are the work of a man who for critical purposes has lost touch with the literature he is discussing and the literary world for which he is writing, and is engaged in the arbitrary arrangement of categories and often disembodied guesses. Despite the tone of succinct wisdom with which these categories and guesses are laid out and related—related, that is to say, in the sense that Pound puts them together—there are no filaments of thought binding them into a whole. Relationships, all sorts of strange relationships, are thrust upon them by Pound's short sharp prose, which has a habit of outrunning both Pound and reality and creating a sealed-off world of its own. …

At what point we should begin to blame Ernest Fenollosa for Pound's later prose and method is hard to say, for although he wrote about Fenollosa and the ‘ideogramic’ method on a number of occasions, he did not explain what he meant by it. Or rather, he wrote three or four explanations which look simple enough at first sight, but are not always easy to interpret when one comes to consider them in detail. Fenollosa, if he did not actually cause Pound's style and method, seems at any rate to have confirmed him in the employment of certain ideas which led in this direction. As I pointed out in my discussion of Fenollosa's influence on the poems of the Lustra period, Fenollosa's widow gave Pound her husband's papers in 1913. Among them was a long essay called ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’, which, according to Pound, was ‘practically finished’ by its author. ‘I have done little more’, he wrote in 1918, ‘than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.’ Pound published the essay first in serial form in the Little Review during 1919, in his own prose book Instigations (1920), and later as a separate booklet in 1936.

Beyond any doubt it enables us to look again with a fresh eye at certain aspects of the language of poetry. Whatever questionable things he may have said, about Shakespeare rarely using the word ‘is’, for instance, he does occasionally stir our reason and imagination by virtue of his insight into the relation between the language of poetry and the energies and forces which pulse, dart, flow, uncoil and merge in the world about us. He does not define this relation carefully, for he is intent mainly on the physical world as something mechanical, and also on proving a theory; but there are precious insights—old problems perceived from a new angle—for anyone who is willing to look for them. With all that he says or suggests about images and freshness of language, it is not hard to see why he appealed to the Pound of the Lustra period, and his influence at this stage was all to the good, confirming Pound in what he had been aiming at for several years before he saw the Fenollosa papers, and at the same time acting as a stimulant, and introducing Pound to the world of Chinese poetry.

Our concern is not with the essay as an independent document, but as an influence on Pound's method and style, so we will begin with what he had to say about it over a period of about twenty years. First the brief introduction he wrote in 1918:

We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognized in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in ‘new’ Western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such.

He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. …

The accent is still on Fenollosa's relation to art, but already he is beginning to think of him as something more than a mere essayist. The work is ‘a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics’; it deals with new ‘modes of thought’: the man whose notebooks a few years before had introduced Pound to Chinese poetry, and caused him to write Cathay, is now beginning to take on the aspect of a philosopher. By 1933 he is a philosopher, one who had outlined the difference between ‘the ideogramic method and the medieval or “logical” method’. Here is how Pound explains the ‘ideogramic’ method in ABC of Reading:

Fenollosa's essay was perhaps too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language.

The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows:

In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction.

Thus, if you ask him what red is, he says it is a ‘colour’.

If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum. …

By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry’, as distinct from that of ‘philosophic discussion’, and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing. …

But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it?

He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint?

He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of

That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.

The Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.¹

In attempting to explain the method further in an article written about 1936, he spoke of ‘The clamping of the word to the individual object’, which was his aim, or one of his aims, with Imagisme in 1912, and then of ‘The clamping of word to groups of objects; not necessarily of the same species, that is to say the ideogramic method (for the purpose of poetry)’. And a year later writing Guide to Kulchur he renewed his attack on western thought, as distinct from the method of the material sciences. These latter, according to Fenollosa (with whom Pound agreed), ‘examined collections of fact, phenomena, specimens, and gathered general equations of real knowledge from them, even though the observed data had no syllogistic connection one with another’. The false knowledge derived from the despised western way of thinking Pound likened to the memorizing of a list of names and maxims from Fiorentino's History of Philosophy, and the real knowledge derived by means of the ‘ideogramic’ method to that of an experienced lover of painting who can tell a picture by Goya from one by Velasquez, and a Velasquez from an Ambrogio Praedis.

To say that this method, as outlined by both Fenollosa and Pound, is built upon a number of misapprehensions is putting it mildly. When Fenollosa wrote of the ‘tyranny of medieval logic’ from which science had had to break free, and Pound of the great contrast between the ‘method of abstraction’ and the ‘method of science’, they were as far almost from the truth as it is possible to get. Both men harboured the idealistic nineteenth-century view of ‘science’. It had a method and if you followed this you got results. Actually this method is composed of at least three separate procedures which play varying parts in the progress of the sciences. There is first the collection of data and accurate labelling; secondly the attempt at describing the behaviour of a selected group of phenomena—this is what people usually mean when they speak of ‘scientific method’; and thirdly, the use of imagination, when the scientist, confronted by a problem, some difficulty in current explanations of phenomena, tries to look at it from different angles; and connected with this aspect is the hunch, the guess, the leap ahead, which play a major role in the advancement of science.

Pound and Fenollosa failed to see that science had made such great progress in the western world precisely because it was based upon the European Middle Ages. Galileo, Newton and Einstein all worked from a base built by countless scholars and philosophers of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. The idea that the men of the Middle Ages did not examine or even look at phenomena is a sad relic of the Enlightenment; the fact is that they carried out an essential collection and labelling of phenomena upon which our modern science rests. This work was primitive by our present standards, but as A. C. Crombie, lecturer in the History of Science at Oxford, points out in Augustine to Galileo, the methods first used with complete maturity by Galileo were expounded in the thirteenth century. There was an essential continuity in the western scientific tradition, from Greek times to the seventeenth century. ‘With the recovery of the full tradition of Greek and Arabic science in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and particularly of the works of Aristotle and Euclid, there was born, from the marriage of the empiricism of technics with the rationalism of philosophy and mathematics, a new conscious empirical science seeking to discover the rational structure of nature.’ The development of ideas on scientific method, and criticism of the fundamental principles of the thirteenth century system made from the end of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century, prepared the way for the more radical changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To a person not trained in modern science, the complexity of medieval science, in its attention to phenomena and precision of method, is quite bewildering, even today.

Working from Fenollosa's mistaken ideas about the history of science, Pound became convinced that modern science had progressed by being in opposition to ‘abstract thought’, whereas abstract thought is one of the main ingredients in scientific progress. It is because scientists shape and reshape abstractions derived from data that they arrive at new explanations of how phenomena operate. Far from being the process which Pound imagines, modern science moves ahead in its own field because, among other things, scientists have ‘logical’ thoughts about the material in front of them, no matter how primitive such thoughts may be in comparison with the highly developed thought systems of the Middle Ages. ‘In Europe,’ says Pound, ‘if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction.’ Exactly, and it was by juggling with this process that western man created the modern technological world. It was only by working with concepts derived from their data, by going into ‘unknown regions’, that scientists found new explanations for the processes of limited groups of phenomena. Science, all science, is based upon the assumption that there is ‘regularity’ in nature and that these regularities may be described in definite terms which will cover all occurrences of the same group of phenomena. It is by abstraction that the scientist draws from some complexity of phenomena a formulation designed to explain how it works. Even Pound's explanation of ‘red’ depends upon the abstraction of this colour from ‘cherry, rose, iron rust, flamingo’. How Pound got the idea that scientists simply heap up information, facts, specimens, and somehow derive knowledge from this material without abstract thought I do not know, but probably it was by his own extension of Fenollosa's ideas in the ‘Chinese Written Character’. Unrelated facts or specimens are of no more use to the scientist than to anyone else. What counts is the discovery of relationships and concepts which have a meaning for the scientist, and this implies thought, abstract thought of one kind or another. When Pound speaks of the biologist getting together a hundred or thousand slides and picking out what is necessary for his general statement, he is not, as he seems to think, describing the method of modern science, but only one part of the material technique belonging to one science. Though even this process, as described by Pound, seems to me to imply abstract thought of the western variety, otherwise how is the biologist to arrive at his general statement?

If you think yourself into a position of believing that knowledge, ‘real knowledge’ to use Pound's term, comes from the mere gathering and examination of objects or facts ‘not necessarily of the same species’, their examination without ‘logical’ thought, the final result, if you are a poet or a prose writer, will be the placing together of unrelated things and calling them related for no other reason than that you have placed them together.

Pound's error, I think, was in imagining that the scientist and philosopher indulge in different kinds of thought. Despite the vast differences in the aims and ends of the two disciplines, both use thought, both use ‘logical’ thought, it is just that the philosopher is much more highly skilled in this department than the other. The progress of the sciences has come mainly through the refinement of techniques, not through any great development of thinking by scientists, but thought is indispensable nevertheless. The reason probably why the two are so often treated as completely different is that people confuse one single aspect of scientific thought—that when the scientist is aware that the facts have outgrown the theory in which they were clothed and is straining to visualize and formulate a new one—with the whole process from beginning to end. The fact is that all human beings who reason do so by means of a process or processes too rapid and subtle for exact description. But to be of any value, reasoning must relate the world of concrete reality with that of abstract notions. As Newman says:

To apprehend notionally is to have breadth of mind, but to be shallow; to apprehend really is to be deep, but to be narrow-minded. The latter is the conservative principle of knowledge, and the former the principle of its advancement. Without the apprehension of notions, we should forever pace round one small circle of knowledge; without a firm hold upon things, we shall waste ourselves in vague speculations.

Even when reasoning about concrete matters the mind does not merely observe and judge:

It is plain that formal logical sequence is not in fact the method by which we are enabled to become certain of what is concrete; and it is equally plain what the real and necessary method is. It is the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review; probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible.

The result of Fenollosa's essay was that in the end Pound almost gave up thought altogether, and instead concerned himself with arranging isolated gists, phrases and facts; ‘possibly small,’ he wrote in 1942, ‘but gristly and resilient, that can't be squashed, that insist on being taken into consideration’. And at the end of this trail: the Thrones Cantos. There we have isolated phrases, fragments of speech, quotations, facts ‘gristly and resilient’, all drawn together and related—their only relationship much of the time being that they appear in the same pages together.

Note

1. It would appear that Pound never actually made enquiries to find out whether the sign for ‘red’ was in fact made in this way, but believed he had seen it mentioned in Fenollosa. But Fenollosa does not say—not in the essay on the ‘Chinese Written Character’ at any rate—that the Chinese made the sign for ‘red’ by putting together the pictures for ‘rose, cherry, iron rust, flamingo’. He simply uses the words ‘cherry, rose, sunset, iron rust, flamingo’ in an explanation of abstract thought, saying nothing at all about Chinese signs.