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2 / The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only because they follow objective lines of relation in nature herself. —ernest fenollosa, “the chinese written character as a medium for poetry: an ars poetica” (1918, 1936) Poetry surpasses prose in this fact especially, that the poet carefully selects those words for juxtaposition in a sentence whose overtones of meaning blend into a delicate and transparent harmony. —ernest fenollosa, “the chinese written language as the medium for poetry” (final draft, ca. 1906) In the late summer of 2004, I was leafing through the Fenollosa papers held in the Ezra Pound archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Library when I happened upon a startling find: its second half. While many scholars have mentioned the earlier drafts of “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” no one had ever mentioned the important fact that the essay published by Pound represents only one half of Fenollosa’s lectures on Chinese as a medium for poetry.1 This “second half” is entitled “Chinese and Japanese. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II.” I am calling it the “second half” because Fenollosa clearly sees the CWC as “Lecture I. Vol. I,” to be followed by “Vol. II.” This view is validated further by a text that combines the two lectures, entitled “Synopsis of Lectures on Chinese and Japanese Poetry.”2 This scholarly oversight is particularly important to take note of since one of the most persistent criticisms of Fenollosa’s work is the near total absence of sound from his discussion of Chinese, and the second half of the CWC is largely devoted to this very subject. Pound only mentions the second half of the lecture one time, when he states, “From his lecture on the Chinese Character I took what seemed to me most needed, omitting the passages re/ sound.”3 After reading through the missing lecture, it becomes perfectly clear why Patterned Harmony: Buddhism, Sound, and Ernest Fenollosa’s Poetics of Correlative Cosmology 60 / buddhist imaginaries Ezra Pound would not find what he “most needed” in the omitted passages : most of that lecture argues for metered and rhymed translations of classical Chinese poetry, which contradicts both Pound’s imagist program and the break from English formalism represented so powerfully by his book of free-verse Chinese translations, Cathay. Yet this second lecture, when read in the context of still other writings only now being published,4 offers more than a translation theory: it reveals a complex set of Buddhist reasons why Fenollosa chose to transliterate Chinese into Japanese (which Pound continued to do for many decades), reveals a greater philosophical context to understand his non-Buddhist predilection for “harmony” and belief in “concrete relations within nature,” and, perhaps most importantly, reveals that Fenollosa possessed a far more richly textured knowledge of classical Chinese (cosmological) poetics from which he created a notion of poetic agency grounded in largely Daoist notions of emptiness. Not only did Fenollosa apparently know a great deal about Chinese prosody and poetic theory, but by following the synthesizing impulse that lies at the core of his New Buddhist agenda, he hoped to import key concepts of Chinese cosmology into both Western poetry and society more generally. In a few words, Fenollosa believed that English verse, unlike the classical Chinese poetry and poetics (by which he meant traditional Chinese prosody and genres) had little to no relationship to philosophical, social, political, or spiritual discourses and therefore had become increasingly irrelevant and metaphysically bankrupt. Following arguments that paralleled his critique of “medieval logic” outlined in Chapter 1, Fenollosa believed that traditional English formalism could be saved from its own irrelevancy and decay by appropriating Chinese poetic theories of “correlative harmony” (which Fenollosa took to be “universal”). In this chapter , I will offer a detailed sketch of what Fenollosa knew about classical Chinese cosmology and poetics, how he hoped to import these ideas and forms into English, and why. As a point of contrast, I bring Ezra Pound back into the discussion to compare his early and later ideas on “Chinese sonority” as they drew upon his own desire to import Confucian concepts into Western poetic, philosophical, and political discourses. Finally, I present an analysis of the political ideologies that connect (or could have connected) their projects together. The following chapter, therefore...

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