Listening to the Late Cantos

Abstract

This chapter explores the sonic possibilities of the Chinese characters in Ezra Pound’s late cantos. Specifically it examines how Pound understood Chinese sound in his late career, and traces what he did with this new understanding in the late cantos. Despite Pound’s enthusiasm for Chinese sound, critics have tended to approach the characters as silent, static material forms, unable to be sounded by the reader, which are antithetical to the lyrical elements of the late cantos and obstruct the poem’s prosodic flow. Arguing against the understanding of the ideograms as merely ‘silent’ objects, this chapter traces how the characters both communicate with and shape the poem’s rhythm and prosody, and what this, in turn, means for Pound’s reader. In doing so, it examines the unstable but productive interchange between graphic and phonetic signification in the late cantos, between image and sound, and explores what a fuller understanding of Pound’s late rehabilitation of Chinese sound might mean for our understanding of the problematic final stages of Pound’s epic.