Lives and Letters
On 2nd September 1666, Great Fire of London began.
On 21st September 1908, Ernest Fenollosa, oriental scholar and art critic, died in London of a heart attack. Five years later, after preparing his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art for publication, Fenollosa’s widow Mary handed over to Ezra Pound all her husband’s remaining notebooks. Pound would produce from these versions of Japanese Noh plays – in turn leading W. B. Yeats to write At the Hawk’s Well – then the poems in Cathay (1915), prompting T. S. Eliot to salute Pound as ‘the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time’. Pound also edited for publication Fenollosa’s extraordinarily influential essay, ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’. Fenollosa’s step-daughter Erwin Scott (‘Noshi’, sixteen), was reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’ to him when he suffered his final, fatal heart attack.
The lights of London were lowered for first time on 11 September 1914 and the distinctively shaped lake in St James’s Park was drained.