Ernest Fenellosa

After his death, Ernest Fenellosa’s widow Sydney McCall contacted Ezra Pound and together they put together Fenellosa’s book, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. The first thing Fenellosa says is that there is nothing as stagnant as a noun, that everything is a matter of process, that an adjective is just a quality of process, and that a noun is a misinterpretation of a verb. The second is that, because the “Chinese Written Character” or ideogram is divisible (east = the sun tangled in a tree’s branches (rising) = 東), there is more information to be gained from the relationship between things than available in the things themselves. While in the West we define by dissection: red is a colour which is a wavelength of light ..., in the East they define by conception. Red? Iron rust, flamingo, sunset.

This interpretation provided Pound with a method. It can easily be confused with the art of omission because both seem to leave gaps. But omission is the deliberate leaving off of something, whereas the ideogrammic method is the careful selection of things to compare. The ideogram makes a requirement of the reader, they are supposed to reconstruct the comparison for themselves and then think about it.

The method saved Pound a lot of trouble. Instead of grasping at an answer, only to disprove it come the morning, he enables us to rebuild a perspective from its parts. For this The Cantos can seem disjointed. They can change subject sporadically and you can’t rely on a narrative to carry you through. To understand The Cantos, we are not only concerned with what Pound is saying at any one time, but also the relationship between the things he says, which is in part defined by their arrangement.

Fugue and Fresco

Pound did not withhold his methods of composition. He tried to explain his fugue to Yeats on the back of an envelope. He referenced ‘subject-rhyme’ and the Eleusinian Rites in a letter to his father, Homer. And he said,

This is the quote used at the beginning of Kay Davis’s book Fugue and Fresco: Structures in Pound’s Cantos. The book is all about form. Davis identifies a few examples in a wide range of Cantos. The major points are:

1. That the dark to light motion of the Eleusinian Rites, and the states of dromena and epopte can be implied across The Cantos. Pound’s awareness of this is legible in his often by-stanza organisation.
2. That subject can act the element of form. For example, while a Bach fugue is a pattern in melody, a Pound fugue is a pattern in subject. Subjects are compared for their ‘rhyme’ (cf. the ideogram), and it seems form is meant to inform our comparison.
3. That there are, at least on occasion, mathematical structures to be found in The Cantos, just as a ring or a fugue has a mathematical (symbolical) representation.

The ideogram suggests form has a purpose, and if it does, Davis often fails to attend to it. For what reason does Pound use form and what meaning do forms carry? What are the capabilities of form and what is the capacity? Does form satisfy the composition? Does Pound compose to that satisfaction? How formal are The Cantos?

Davis takes a tour through forms suggested by Pound and identifies a few convincing instances. But the study of form in The Cantos is left largely undone and mapping Pound’s arrangement might be key to understanding the poem. For a number of reasons I think a digital approach is suitable to the discovery of form in The Cantos. The first experiment, Plutarch’s Eleusinian Rites, tries to discover instances of form by measuring language using AI.