Robert Kern wrote a wonderful book called _Orientalism, Modernism & the
American Poem_.  In it, he goes into some detail about the "deeper
roots" of Pound and Fenollossa's ideogrammatic convictions, saying that
they can be found "not only in American literary history (particularly
the work of Emerson) but in intellectual and linguistic traditions that
go back at least as far as the Renaissance" (ix).  He argues that EP
and EF's interests and accomplishments vis a vis Chinese poetry are
grounded in a long history of western thinkers pursuing "Adamic
language", that is, an ideal immediacy between sign and referent (as
when Adam named the animals.)

The debate about Adam's language goes back quite a ways.  I won't bore
anyone with the details, but I will mention that 17th century English
and French thinkers became enamored for a while of ideogrammatic
language, even considering a variation of Chinese script for use in
official state discourse.  Their notion was that ideograms conveyed a
complicated statement in a small written package, and were not so
susceptible to rhetorical over-elaboration as was analytic, phonetic
English.  Back in the real world, they were clearly wrong, and Swift
parodied the notion by describing a society where everyone has to carry
bags full of objects in order to communicate with one another,
displaying the different objects at appropriate times.

(Chinese thinking and writing continued to animate the philosophes of
the Enlightenment.  Francois de Quesnay, the classical economist who
most influenced Adam Smith, was a so-called "physiocrat", believing
that economies worked because of the land's natural production, and
that Europeans should practice the Chinese imperial habit of "wu wei",
meaning "no effort"; the land, he believed, and the commerce flowing
off of its bounty, required no special state control and should be let
alone to make or do the things it makes and does.  He translated "wu
wei" as "laissez faire".  Adam Smith kept the French term as it was,
and now every American junior high social studies text quotes Confucian
principles without realizing they are doing so, blithely believing they
are talking about what they call "capitalism".)

Europeans searching for more immediate, revivified ways of writing
would return periodically to the ideogram.  Interestingly, during the
nineteenth century, while German philologists did everything they could
to denigrate Chinese as a fossilized, stunted, only-half-finished
language (far inferior to their beloved Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and, oh
hey, German as well,) Egyptian hieroglyphics were decoded by M.
Champollion, and European thinkers had a different kind of ancient
pictographic language to idealize and reify as something that it was
not.  And they did so to great effect: the Scarlet Letter (the letter,
not the narrative) is called a hieroglyph, Moby Dick (the whale, not
the narrative) is called a hieroglyph, the Purloined Letter (ditto) is
called a hieroglyph, and Walt Whitman's first edition of _Leaves of
Grass_ came out without the author's name on the title page, replaced
instead by his engraved portrait, as if the image were enough to
signify _Leaves_ as Walt's textual double.

By the time Fenollossa wrote his famous notebooks, and by the time EP
got his hands on them, Chinese poetry had been what they call
"translated" a number of times into English.  Usually, the translators
knew no Chinese, and had no fancy collection of glosses from Japanese
literature professors to assist them.  Instead, most translators of
Chinese verse did everything they could to excise the impression that
the poems had ever been Chinese at all, and were for the most part
content to "translate" other already-English translations into updated
verse forms.  Lancelot Cranmer-Byng, for instance, "translated" Herbert
Giles' already published work by substituting Pre-Raphaelite
conventions for Tennysonian ones.  In neither case does the Chinese
poem escape being domesticated into English: four-line poems with four
syllables per line suddenly explode into verse paragraphs of fourteen
lines or more.

With these two governing conditions in place ( 1 - Euro-American
authors have a tradition of becoming dissatisfied with phonetic,
analytic English as a vehicle for linguistic immediacy, and 2 - the
translation of Chinese poetry into English almost never treated it as
appropriately "other" to indigenous English verse), we have to notice
that Pound (along with Fenollosa) fulfilled two different tasks by
talking about the ideogram as a medium for poetry: they signalled that
the ancient desire for Adamic language had been reignited, and
demonstrated that "imagism" (variously and ably defined for us by Rick
and Dirk) as a short-line verse form concentrating on brevity and
juxtaposition was a way for English to pose as Chinese, a way for
phonetics to substitute for 'real', pictographic ideograms.  This
facility of imagism to represent "otherness" might have contributed to
its being so romantically available to writers of varying skill.  (I
think it's important to remember, therefore, that Pound gave "amygism"
its name because of a strong dislike for its products and producers,
and not because he had some sober rationale for distinguishing between
them on the basis of simple criteria.)

Along with the discussion of images, vortices, and ideograms, we should
periodically recall that "the East" is "given" a special sort of
modernist-derived image of its own.  It's easy to forget that _Cathay_
is not really Cathay, and that Chinese poetry (even by L'iu Che) is not
modernist or "imagist" or vers libre at all.  It has been cast into
this form by Euro-American tendencies to spot themselves in others'
images.  I don't mean to imply too Saidian of a rant here, but it's
clear to me that Pound only "invented" China for "our" time, our
script, our grammar, and our own patterned energy of narcissism.  And
for that, he gets both praise and hesitation.

Regards to all,
Jon