The essence of poetry lies in its expression of emotions, as is the case with poetry translation, which aims not only to express the meaning, but more importantly, to convey the emotions in the original poem. The study of Pound’s Cathay explores into the gains and losses in his translation of emotions from his idea of “Energy in Language” as well as his creative translation. The translation practice in Cathay shows that his two strategies of image juxtaposition and absolute rhythm have greatly enhanced the emotional effect in poetry translation. However, what cannot be neglected is that due to the distinct cultural background, there have been misreading about the poetry images and misunderstanding of the form of Chinese poetry, which inevitably lead to loss of emotional effect in poetry translation. It is hoped that this study can enlighten poetry translators and arouse their attention to the translation of emotions in poetry to gradually improve the translation quality of classical Chinese poetry.