The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for PoetryFirst published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosas essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But