SOURCE: "Ezra Pound's 'Cathay': Compilation from the Fenollosa Notebooks," in Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, Vol. 17, Nos. 2 & 3, Fall & Winter, 1988, pp. 9-46.

In the following essay, Chappie relies on one of Ezra Pound's lesser-known essays on Chinese poetics to illuminate Pound's reliance on Fenollosa's notes to produce the poems published in Cathay.

In 1918, three years after Cathay appeared, Pound published a little known, two-part essay on Chinese poetry, in which he observed:

In China a "compiler" is a very different person from a commentator. A compiler does not merely gather together, his chief honour consists in weeding out, and even in revising.¹

His definition refers to the Chinese poet Rihaku, head of the court office of poetry, but it might just as easily apply to Pound himself as inheritor of the Fenollosa notebooks on Chinese poetry. Like Rihaku, Pound was primarily engaged in "weeding out" many...