Fenollosa Pound Olson and the Chinese written character

 

"The first was Ernest Fenollosa's provocative essay 'The Chinese Wriiten Character as a Medium for Poetry.' He found the Pound-edited text of the essay in the latter's book Instigations and excitedly copied out its main arguments into his notebook that June. Fenollosa's account of the exhaustion of poetic qualities in modern discourse resulting from a degeneration of the original capacity of language to mime the physical processes, and his implicit advocacy of a return to the state of primal verbal immediacy, with words once again becoming instrumental to the creation of 'a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature,' held for Olson the same appeal it had for Pound before him.--Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life. pg. 103.