Ideogram and Ideology

Abstract

A major feature of Pound’s unique consistency, despite all contradictions, obscurities and ambivalences, lies probably in the constant interaction between all his productions. In a reply to Yvor Winters’s objections that Pound had been guilty of an ‘abandonment of logic in the Cantos’, he defended the method of his poem by a reference to his prose writings; Winters could attack the paratactical method ‘presumably because he has never read Fenollosa or any prose criticism and has never heard of the ideogrammic method’.² Thus these other texts appear as prerequisites to an understanding of the Cantos, and na reader can decipher the rapid succession of allusions, quotations and individual voices if he ignores the essays, the translations, the various introductions and even the letters. If one is loath to be disqualified, turned out of the club of the elect, it is necessary to start reassembling the parts of the huge ideogram which can be named ‘Ezra Pound’, so that a strange and new vitality starts animating the discrete facets and elements, down to seemingly irrelevant details. The paradox of such writing, which emphasises division, heterogeneity, disintegration in order to reassert the fundamental cohesion of the whole, is implicit in the very terms by which Pound defines his ideogrammic method or system.

‘3 vols of Ideology’ Pray explain to me this neological title! What does it mean? When Bonaparte used it, I was delighted with it, upon the common principle of delight in everything we cannot understand. Does it mean Idiotism? The science of non compos mentuism ? The Science of Lunacy? The theory of Delirium? Or does it mean the Science of Self-Love of amour propre? or the elements of vanity? (John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 16 December 1816¹)