BK. Ezra Pound

150. Miyake, Akiko. ‘A Note on So-shu’. Paideuma 6 (1977): 325-28.

Miyake’s article itself does not concern Japanese materials, but it sets off a fray in the pages of Paideuma that does. By comparing Giles’s History of Chinese Literature, which Fang (102) demonstrated was a source for Pound, with Fenollosa’s manuscripts, which had not been available when Fang published his study, Miyake corrects Fang’s assertion that Pound was confusing Li Po with Chuang Chou in his references to ‘So-shu’ in canto II (35a), and contends that ‘whatever the reason Pound evoked So-shu . . . we have to seek it in some interpretation other than [his] sources’. Hesse (151) disagrees, Read (159) takes Hesse to task, and Cooper (173) tries to solve the problem with help from a Japanese creation myth.