EARLY CONTACT

For Pound the Orient primarily meant China and Japan and his initial exchange with the Far East was through visual media. Born in Hailey, Idaho and raised in Pennsylvania, Pound witnessed America's early vogue for Japonisme and Chinoiserie. His parents, like many who had admired Far Eastern artifacts at the Centennial International Exhibition (1876), had a Ming vase in their house in suburban Philadelphia. Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, just in time for a rich collection of Chinese wood-carvings, ink paintings, and calligraphic objects mounted in the newly opened Free Museum of Science and Art, now the University of Pennsylvania Museum. On a visit to his beloved “Aunt Frank” in New York City in his last years in America, he was shown a screen-book with waterscape scenes alongside manuscript poems in Chinese and Japanese. This screen-book, a relic from Japan, was to become the main source of Canto xlix.

Pound's appreciation of the Orient was, nevertheless, awakened not in America but in England in 1909, and what first opened his eyes to the unique strength of oriental aesthetic were a series of lectures on “Art and Thought in East and West” by the British Museum Assistant Keeper of Oriental Art, Laurence Binyon (1869–1943). As a frequenter of the British Museum, Pound had the freedom to inspect for himself the rare artworks Binyon had described, and as one of Binyon's circle of friends haunting the Vienna Café, he had the privilege to discuss all aspects of oriental culture with the curious as well as the expert during lunch hours.