or cluster... A vortex, from which, and through which, and into which
ideas are constantly rushing.”^7 If, as Pound says in “A Retrospect,” “the natu-
ral object is always the adequate symbol” (Literary Essays 4), if, as he puts it
later in the ABC of Reading, the Chinese ideogram is the touchstone for poets
because, unlike the letter unit of the Western alphabet, the ideogram pro-
vides us with “the picture of a thing,”^8 then the proper name is essential to
a poetics of “constatation of fact,” of “accuracy of sentiment.”^9 Indeed, so
“accurate” and speci¤c are Pound’s images and proper names that critics like
Hugh Kenner and Richard Sieburth have remarked on their documentary
realism: one can, it is often said, ¤nd a particular fresco in a given Roman-
esque church, by following the “directions” in The Cantos. Pound’s, says Ken-
ner, is a “Michelin map [that] will guide you, perhaps two hours by car from
Montségur. A system of words denotes that veri¤able landscape.... The
words point, and the arranger of the words works in trust that we shall ¤nd
their connections validated outside the poem.”^10
In Pound’s later work, Imagist “constatation of fact” is increasingly asso-
ciated with Confucianism—speci¤cally, the doctrine in the Analects cited by
Pound at the opening of Guide to Kulchur:
Tseu-Lou asked: If the Prince of Mei appointed you head of the gov-
ernment, to what wd. you ¤rst set your mind?
Kung: To call people and things by their names, that is by the correct
denominations, to see that the terminology was exact....
If the terminology be not exact, if it ¤t not the thing, the governmental
instructions will not be explicit, if the instructions aren’t clear and the
names don’t ¤t, you can not conduct business properly.^11The chêng ming, as the “recti¤cation of names” is called, is essential to a
well-ordered society. Things in actual fact, Confucius believed, should be
made to accord with the implication attached to them by names. Indeed, as
Fung Yu-Lan puts it in his history of Chinese philosophy, “every name con-
tains certain implications which constitute the essence of that class of things
to which this name applies. Such things, therefore, should agree with this
ideal essence. The essence of a ruler is what the ruler ideally ought to be....
There is an agreement between name and actuality.”^12
No doubt Pound yearned for such a perfect ¤t, for the hierarchical order
¤rst celebrated in Canto 13 (“Kung walked in the temple... ”) and ampli¤ed
by Pound in his translation of Confucian writings called The Unwobbling
Pivot & the Great Digesty (1947). In theory, the Confucian Ch’I (“air” or
“breath”), which Pound derived from Mencius, is regularly invoked in The
42 Chapter 3