Pound's subcareer as an orientalist begins, to be sure, with his work on Fenollosa's notebooks, but it could also be said to begin with his association, starting not long after his arrival in London in 1908, with T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and their small circle of aspirants toward a new English poetry. That aspiration, which resulted most significantly in the imagist movement, involved oriental poetry, especially what Pound called “the Japanese hokku,” right from the start. Indeed, when he received her husband's papers from Fenollosa's widow, Mary, in 1913, Pound's own recent work included what were to become some of his most famous imagist lyrics, such as the haiku-like “In a Station of the Metro” and the deliberately imagist adaptations of several Chinese poems which he had read in translation in Herbert Giles's History of Chinese Literature (1901). Pound placed all of these poems together in his 1916 volume, Lustra.

Although Pound's reading of Fenollosa intensified his interest in Chinese poetry and the Japanese Noh drama and ultimately led him beyond imagism, orientalism and modernism are closely bound up with one another from the very beginning of his career. Indeed, one way to characterize the relationship of orientalism and modernism in his work is to say not only that Pound modernized orientalism, which is one of the implications of T. S. Eliot's well-known claim that Pound is “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time,” but that he orientalized modernism, in the sense that his versions of Chinese poems became models for modernist poetry in general, both in his own work and in that of other poets as well.