The place of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” as a major document of twentieth-century American poetry and poetics is secure—if only that is the right place to put it. Donald Davie considered it “perhaps the only English document of our time fit to rank with Sidney’sApologie, and the Preface toLyrical Ballads, and Shelley’sDefence.”¹ And Charles Olson: “the damned best piece on language since when.”² In the eyes of Ezra Pound, its first editor, it was “a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics” and “the first definite assertion...

This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.

The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most...

This Twentieth Century not only turns a new page in the Book of the World, but opens another and a startling Chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.

[Especially for Great Britain and for the United States it sounds a note of hope, and, at the same time, a note of warning. They alone, of modern peoples still bear aloft the torch of freedom, advance the banner of individual culture. They alone, perhaps, possess the tolerance and the sympathy required to understand the East, and...

As East and West permanently come together, their literature, as well as their arts, will demand a comparative study. It would be Chinese narrowness in us to assume that the only literature or the only laws of literature are ours, which Europe has built up from Homer to Kipling. Already we have to admit Sanskrit language and Buddhist thought to the ranks of literature. But Sanskrit and Pali are alphabetic in writing, and so akin to ours. Is it possible that any of the hieroglyphic languages could possibly attain in their written records to the rank of literature? The Egyptian...

This process of devitalizing language¹ we have already seen to be only partially accomplished in the case of Chinese. Practically all words are verbs, and all retain some transitive meaning, and we saw the little parasites of prepositions, adjectives, intransitives & passives, even negatives, only beginning to grow up. It is we who mistranslate Chinese words into our modern weak vocabularies.

Falling back, then, upon the certainty that the transitive sentence is natural and primitive, we can easily see how, in grammar, more complex forms of sentences grow out of it. The germ of this is the fact that one act...

I have repeatedly heard it said, and seen it written, that the Chinese race and civilization, compared with the Japanese, are of a decidedly inferior type. Unprogressive China is supposed to be ugly, prosaic, and degraded; mechanical in temperament, sordid and practical in aim. The art of Japan, especially, is thought to shine by contrast with that of her western neighbor. It is expressly asserted that the Chinese have never been a nation of artists, poets, and idealists.

This prejudice I believe to be unfounded. Although a lover of things Japanese, I can best show the grounds of my esteem,...

The character and meaning of the far, alien world we call the East have merely pricked the curiosity of stray scholars, or spurred the ambition of a few adventurous merchants. Most of us read of British diplomacy at Peking with a vague curiosity, as an echo from another planet rather than as the crisis of modern history. Of those who have lived in the very theatre of the East, few were able to discern the plot of the unfolding drama, or attempt to warn their countrymen with pen and speech. The prophet is yet heard sneeringly who claims in Chinese...

Considering its enormous size, its great age, and its importance to the world, it seems strange that Western knowledge of China should have been, from earlier days, a matter of extremely slow growth.

To the ancient Greeks and Romans, China was hardly more than a remote producer of the silken fabrics which they loved, but of the nature of which they were quite ignorant. To the Nestorian Christians and the Arabs who were privileged to reside in that far land at the height of its genius in the eighth century, it seems to have presented merely a promising object for...

After meeting Mrs Fenollosa¹ at Sarojini Naidu’s² in in or about 19 she read some of my verse and decided that I was “the only person who could deal with her late husband’s note books as he would wished.” I was then totally ignorant of ideogram but published three attempts to follow her wishes, the contents of “Cathay” being what most interested me.

From his lecture on the Chinese Character I took what seemed to me most needed, omitting the passages re/ sound. Prof. Carus delayed publication with the true spirit of American professoriality.³ He did not ultimately lose the...