You are here
Back to topThe Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (Paperback)
Description
First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound's understanding--it is fair to say, his appropriation--of the text. Fenollosa's manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North America
and East Asia.
About the Author
ERNEST FRANCISCO FENOLLOSA (1853-1908) taught at the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1890 he became Asian curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. EZRA POUND (1884-1972) was a leading Modernist poet and the driving force behind Imagism and Vorticism. HAUN SAUSSY is Bird White Housum Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.His books include The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic and Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China. JONATHAN STALLING is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is a co-editor of The Chinese Written Character as aMedium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (Fordham). LUCAS KLEIN is a graduate student in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University.