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Read in light of French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's How Natives Think (1910), Ezra Pound's comments on Chinese language and the color red in his ABC of Reading (1934)put him in a linguistic tradition that became known as "linguistic relativism," i.e. the idea that different languages and their structures in various ways affect their users' worldviews. So does his deployment of color terms in some of his poems. In fact, both Lévy-Bruhl and Pound, as well as Ernest Fenollosa, whose essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (written ca. 1903) Pound edited and published, can meaningfully be labeled linguistics relativists, rather than for example "Cratylists" which previously has been suggested in Pound's case. All in all, Lévy-Bruhl and Fenollosa aided Pound in chiseling out his specifically poetic version oflinguistic relativism, as part of a project to counter abstraction by using concrete and vivid language.
Keywords: Ezra Pound / Lucien Lévy-Bruhl / Ernest Fenollosa / linguistic relativity / modernist poetry
Linguistic relativism, as advocated by American anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), seemingly reached the peak of its influence in the 1950s, only to experience a decline. However, studies such as John Leavitt's Linguistic Relativities (2010) and Aneta Pavlenko's The Bilingual Mind, and What it Tells Us about Language and Thought (2014) indicate that this train of thinking is undergoing a revival. In this article, I will suggest that linguistic relativism may be of interest also for the study of modernist poetry.
Although linguistic relativism at times has been portrayed as a belief in the downright impossibility of grasping the worldviews of people speaking a radically different primary language, Pavlenko demonstrates that Whorf on the contrary "saw the learning of another language as a way to transcend the categories of one's own" (9). It is crucial to take note of this point, for it was in fact largely a commonplace in the early twentieth century that second language learning was cognitively damaging. As a student of Romance languages, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) thought otherwise. Both in theory and in practice he stressed the value of immersing oneself in foreign and historically remote languages. In November 1913, the novelist Mary McNeil Fenollosa (1865-1954), widow of American art historian and "Orientalist"...