Montage and gesture (Ezra Pound / Henri Michaux): two poetics of the ideogram

This essay compares the way in which writers Ezra Pound and Henri Michaux incorporate a dialogue with Chinese writing in their thought and poetic works, and especifically with the notion of ideogram as a way to understand the nature of Chinese writing. Both Pound and Michaux share an intense fascination with the pictographic dimension of Chinese writing, which they see as less radically divorced from things than alphabetic writing. Pound, however, incorporates the ideogram as an element that is integrated into the montage of quotations, perceptions, anecdotes, and images through which his Cantos are constructed, while for Michaux, the ideogram serves as a starting point to imagine a kind of writing that would be freed from the prisonhouse of meaning.