Pound's "Ideogrammic Method" as Illustrated in Canto XCIX

NE OF THE MOST COMMON TERMS applied to Ezra Pound's Cantos 't.J has been taken from the theory about the Chinese character which Pound derived from Ernest Fenollosa. Pound believed that almost all the characters are ideograms, that is, composed of two or more pictures which when put together create a new word; to choose a real ideogram as an example, sun and moon together mean bright. He also believed that various elements put together in a canto (or in The Cantos as a whole) create a new concept. Canto XCIX is, like most of the cantos, an ideogram in the sense that it consists largely of passages from The Sacred Edict of K'ang Hsi juxtaposed to create a picture of the Confucian ideal of Chinese society. A good many of the passages themselves use Pound's theory by treating the characters as ideograms and analyzing them in accordance with what Pound believed to be their elements. There is a further use of ideogram in that passages from The Sacred Edict are juxtaposed with references to other sources and other civilizations. This canto is thus a good example for a detailed examination of one use of the ideogrammic method in practice, in both its narrowest and its broader senses, to see what Pound really did with it. Pound's frequent statement that only through particulars can we come to generalizations is nowhere better illustrated than in attempting to see how his theories are applied in The Cantos; by a close examination of his method in one canto one can learn how to read other cantos. It can hardly be expected that everyone will agree with the conclusions drawn from these particulars, but we will try to avoid the irritation and also the adulation, one or the other of which has characterized a good deal of Pound criticism. Certainly we should give ample illustrations of a unique method of composition. Canto XCIX is a continuation of Canto XCVIII, most of which also deals with The Sacred Edict, but since that canto has already been analyzed fairly completely, it will be treated only incidentally

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