What can one, seemingly insignificant figure–possibly punctuation mark, possibly ideogram, possibly something else entirely–demonstrate about Ezra Pound’s figurative practice? #, which draws power from associations with Mencius’s well-field system and the Chinese character ching, becomes an emblem for a recurring quodlibet in The Cantos: how forces, and the structures allowing for these forces’ expression, coordinate into modes of holistic figuration. Critical work on The Cantos has entirely passed over #’s potential role in negotiating these two aspects (structure and force). Recuperating # as a figurative model allows for new ways of cognizing the expressive possibilities, and limitations, bound up in Pound’s figurative practices, as well as his poetics more generally.