China and the West

Ezra Pound and Mary McNeil Fenollosa.
Qian Zhaoming : In 1960 Pound said : "I met her [Mrs. Fenollosa] at Sarojini Naidu's and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done. Fenollosa saw what needed to be done but he didn't have time to finish it."
Letter from Pound to Dorothy Shakespear ; 2 October, 1913.
"Dined on Monday with Sarojini Niadu [Naidu] and Mrs Fenolosa [Fenollosa], relict of the writer on chinese art, selector of a lot of Freer"s stuff, etc. I seem to be getting orient from all quarters. I'm stocked up with K'ung fu Tsze [Confucius] and Men Tsze [Mengzi] etc. I suppose they'll keep me calm for a week or so."
The second meeting between Mrs. Fenollosa and Pound took place in the Café Royal on the evening of 6 October. Amont the party also were Sarojini Naidu and William Heinemann, the publisher who brought out Fenollosa's posthumous Epochs. By then, Pound not only had perused Pauthier's French translation of Confucius and Mencius but had gone through the early chapters of H.A. Giles' History of Chinese literature. Mrs. Fenollosa was impressed and satisfied. A third meeting between the two was scheduled on 29 September, 1913..
Letter from Pound to Dorothy Shakespeare ; 7 October, 1913.
"I find the chinese stuff far more consoling. There is no long poem in chinese. They hold if a man can't say what he wants to in 12 lines, he'd better leave it unsaid. THE period was 4th cent. B.C. – Chu Yüan, Imagiste."
Pound recalled forty-five years later : "… and after a couple of weeks I got a note : would I come to that hotel in Trafalgar Square at any rate, it is where my grandfather stayed. There she [Mrs. Fenollosa] was, gone like a priestess at an altar, and she merely said, 'You're the only person who can finish this stuff the way Ernest wanted it done'. Then she sent me his manuscript…"
Pound's meeting with Mary Fenollosa opened up a new phase in his career – the phase marked by his Chinese studies. In the Chinese models provided by Giles – notably Qu Yuan and Liu Che – Pound found an art more objective than the Greek, more suggestive than the Provençal, more precise than the modern French, and more brilliant and resourceful than the medieval Japanese. To illustrate his Imagist theories now, he would have to include, amont other things, the Chinese voice.