ABC of Reading Read online

  ABC of Reading

  by

  EZRA POUND

  INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL DIRDA

  A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL DIRDA

  ABC

  HOW TO STUDY POETRY

  WARNING

  1

  CHAPTER ONE

  Laboratory Conditions

  Ideogrammic Method

  CHAPTER TWO

  What is Literature?

  What is the Use of Language?

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Compass, Sextant, or Landmarks

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tests and Composition Exercises

  Second Set

  Further Tests

  Basis

  Liberty

  Exercise

  XIXth Century

  Study

  Perception

  The Instructor

  Tastes

  DISSOCIATE

  DICHTEN=CONDENSARE

  2

  Exhibits

  Four Periods

  Exercise

  Style of a Period

  A Table of Dates

  Other Dates

  To Recapitulate

  Whitman

  TREATISE ON METRE

  INDEX

  EZRA POUND: ABC OF READING

  An introduction by Michael Dirda

  Ezra Pound never took a single undergraduate course in English poetry. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania he failed a class in the history of literary criticism. In the way of such things, it was probably inevitable that he should emerge as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets and critics.

  Pound’s distinctive genius lay in his unbounded energy and exuberance. As the poet Donald Hall once observed, he combined “accuracy of taste” with “energetic magnanimity.” That magnanimity took myriad forms, from helping shape T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to passing along secondhand clothes to the impoverished James Joyce — and, later on, persuading The Egoist to serialize A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Yet even while Pound was tirelessly calling for poets and novelists to “make it new,” he was also arguing for a return to origins, for a reexamination of Provençal lyrics, Renaissance translations, and the poetry of such underestimated figures as the Earl of Rochester and Walter Savage Landor. The only classics that truly mattered, he maintained, were those of the “first intensity,” those that broke fresh ground, invented or revealed new formal techniques, added a tool to the writer’s kit. As such, they provided the serious reader with needed “axes of reference.”

  ABC of Reading is Pound’s concise introduction to these touchstones — or at least the European ones — and it establishes what he would later call a “set of measures, standards, voltometers.” In fact, Pound’s little book — something of a literary equivalent to The Elements of Style — gathers the artistic convictions and observations, his so-called gists and piths, from thirty years of personal and journalistic writing about literature.

  In editorials for The Little Review, in “Letters from Europe” for The Dial, and in myriad essays for various other periodicals, the young Pound had both hammered out and proclaimed his esthetic principles. Like Nietzsche, Pound quickly mastered the aphoristic provocation: “The history of art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.” The business of a critic is not “to write huge tomes ‘about’ this, that, and the other but ‘to dig out the fine thing forgotten.’” “In each age one or two men of genius find something, and express it. It may be in only a line or two lines, or in some quality of cadence; and thereafter two dozen, or two hundred, or two more thousand followers repeat and dilute and modify.” “All that the critic can do for the reader or audience or spectator is to focus his gaze or audition.”

  As such brilliant sloganeering shows, Pound’s criticism is determinedly flamboyant and personal. Wyndham Lewis regarded his old friend, with some condescension, as “half sensationalist, half impresario, half-poet.” About the same time Gertrude Stein called him “a village explainer.” More accurately, Pound — who in his early twenties was briefly a professor of Romance languages at Wabash College in Indiana — never really stopped being a teacher. In later years he made himself into a one-man Ezuversity.

  Open to virtually any page of Pound’s critical writing or commentary, from 1910’s Spirit of Romance, a study of medieval poetry, to 1964’s anthology Confucius to Cummings, and you will hear his no-nonsense, pedagogical voice. It’s so striking and memorable that one can hardly quote it enough: “I have always wanted to write ‘poetry’ that a grown man could read without groans of ennui.” Literature is meant “to relieve, refresh, revive the mind of the reader — at reasonable intervals — with some form of ecstasy, by some splendor of thought, some presentation of sheer beauty, some lightning turn of phrase.” “You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them.”

  Again and again, Pound rightly stresses that “art is a joyous thing” and that we need “a greater levity, a more befitting levity, in our study of the arts.” Is it any surprise then that ABC of Reading might well be the most lively and provocative work of literary criticism ever written? As its author says on its opening page: “Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.” Throughout the exhilarating first half of ABC one finds jokes, put-downs, ripostes, and shrewd remarks cloaked in humor: “France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership of Europe when their academic period was cut down to 40 minutes.”

  In fact, when not sounding like the best literature professor you will ever have, Pound could almost pass for a modern-day blogger. He buttonholes the reader in a voice that is colloquial, brassy, and loud. He even writes in short paragraphs, like twitter messages or video sound bites. All his life Pound searched for a forum where he could broadcast to the world his ideas about poetry, the arts and society. He would have loved the internet. In attacking the clay icons of the literary establishment of his day Pound was even snarky, long before the word existed. He proudly admitted, “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”

  Though sometimes a scourge, Pound was at his best as modernism’s press agent or carnival barker: “It is after all a grrrreat litttttterary PERIOD!” A movement needs manifestos and polemics, publications with names like Blast and The Enemy, and labels, lots of labels — Imagism, Vorticism — that might attract media attention. When T. S. Eliot, in the dedication of The Waste Land, called Pound “il miglior fabbro,” the better maker, he may have spoken more shrewdly than he knew. Yes, Pound was a great “maker,” an old term for poet (cf. William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers”), and he did possess his era’s most sensitive ear for the music of verse. But he was also a better “macher,” the Yiddish word for a deal-maker, the guy who knows how to make things happen.

  Pound did this largely through hectoring personal communication. When James Laughlin, the future publisher of New Directions, visited the poet at his home in Rapallo, Italy, in 1934—35, Pound told him that postage was his greatest single expense. After all, he corresponded with people from around the world, sometimes advising W.H.D. Rouse on his translation of Homer or Laurence Binyon on his translation of Dante, sometimes assailing U.S. congressmen about economic reform. Nonetheless, as the 1930s advanced, Pound’s already cracker-barrel epistolary style grew increasingly eccentric — more and more pockmarked with abbreviations, odd spellings, nicknames, words in ALL CAPS, and almost incomprehensible allusions. “Fat-Faced Frankie,” for i
nstance, was the Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch. In effect, the poet’s idiosyncratic correspondence took on the appearance of extreme text-messaging.

  By the late 1930s, alas, Pound’s various intellectual passions overheated. He grew starry-eyed over Mussolini as a kind of Renaissance strong man, rabid about the cause of distributive economics and “Social Credit,” increasingly anti-Semitic, and generally loony about anything outside of art and poetry. The later installments of his masterwork, The Cantos, not only highlight his obsessions but also sink under increased hermeticism. His notorious anti-American radio talks during World War II often ranted incoherently, stymieing transcribers. Regarded as a traitor at war’s end and locked up in a cage for three weeks during 1945, Pound finally suffered a complete psychological breakdown.

  Instead of being imprisoned or shot (as he expected), the poet was committed to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington D.C. and lived there for twelve years, from 1946 to 1958. When Pound was finally released, following petitions from virtually every major American writer of his generation, as well as considerable secret string-pulling, the poet returned to Italy, worked desultorily on his later Cantos, grew increasingly depressed, then utterly silent. He came to wonder if his life’s work was a botch, finally repudiated his deluded politically based anti-Semitism, and only emerged from seclusion to visit the grave of James Joyce, attend the funeral of T. S. Eliot, and say goodbye to Marianne Moore and the failing William Carlos Williams. Pound himself died in 1972 at the age eighty-seven, and is buried in Venice.

  As a poet, Ezra Pound is seemingly inexhaustible in his variousness. One might say — to paraphrase T. S. Eliot’s original (Dickensian) title for “The Waste Land” — that “He Do the Poems in Different Voices.” Pound was a genuine shape-shifter, taking on one persona after another to produce complicated troubadour stanzas, compact imagist “haiku,” scathing satirical verse, translations of Old English, imitations of Propertius, the limpidly beautiful Chinese poems of Cathay, Japanese Noh plays, the polyphonic Cantos. “Like Picasso and Stravinsky,” as Guy Davenport says, he “has styles rather than a style.”

  But, again, that’s Pound the poet. As a critic and literary theorist, he was much more narrowly focused. Throughout his life, Pound trumpeted forth the same basic tenets: Learn from the poets who, in their time, made it new! Clarity, economy, and precision are the supreme virtues! Translations are also poetry! Better to know a few poems really well than a great many only on the surface! Keep to a natural syntax — and listen to the sound of your words! Acquire enough Latin, Italian, or Provençal to work your way through the few poems that really matter! Stay alert and curious! Pound himself once said that for forty years he’d been shouting, in a phrase borrowed from a self-help book, “Wake up and live!”

  T. S. Eliot viewed Pound’s criticism as “almost the only contemporary writing on the Art of Poetry that a young poet can study with profit.” As he stressed: “Pound was original in insisting that poetry is an art, an art which demands the most arduous application and study; and in seeing that in our time it had to be a highly conscious art. He also saw that a poet who knows only the poetry of his own language is as poorly equipped as the painter or musician who knows only the painting or the music of his own country.”

  Certainly Pound took the creation of art, and the writing of poetry in particular, as a serious commitment, requiring study and apprenticeship. “Who makes the living line must sweat!” In the opening of ABC of Reading, Pound relates a version of the once-famous anecdote of naturalist Louis Agassiz and the Fish: Asked to describe a sunfish, a graduate student offers the scientific name. No, says Agassiz. That’s not enough. I want you to really look hard at it, to learn everything you can about this one simple animal. “At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.”

  The arts require a comparable focused intensity. “Any teacher of biology would tell you that knowledge can NOT be transmitted by general statement without knowledge of particulars.” Pound rightly points out that “a man can learn more music by working on a Bach fugue until he can take it apart and put it together, than by playing through ten dozen heterogeneous albums.” He also repeatedly calls for a kind of comparative anatomy of the arts, stressing that “all teaching of literature should be performed by the presentation and juxtaposition of specimens of writing and not by discussion of some other discusser’s opinion about the general standing of a poet or author.” A maxim from The Unwobbling Pivot — Pound’s translation of the Confucian Chung Yung — notes that everyone eats and drinks, but what matters is to be able to distinguish the flavors. “Nothing but some sort of close comparison, of close inspection of the actual text of authors themselves in contradistinction to diluted reviews, will be of any use.”

  Does this approach to close reading sound difficult? In truth, “Real education must ultimately be limited to men” — and to women — “who INSIST on knowing.” The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention — and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread. By contrast, “the secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitual slack attention.”

  As should be clear, much of Pound’s advice is tacitly addressed to would-be writers. In 1916 Pound is already saying to the young poet Iris Barry: “How much have you read? How much have you read as a reader reading the story? How much as artist analyzing the method?” Eliot underscores that “Pound’s great contribution to the work of other poets … is his insistence upon the immensity of the amount of conscious labor to be performed by the poet; and his invaluable suggestions for the kind of training the poet should give himself — study of form, metric, and vocabulary in the poetry of divers literatures, and study of good prose.” As the Miglior Fabbro writes with considerable understatement: “Technical solidity is not attained without at least some persistence.” Or, as Thomas Carlyle famously observed, genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

  Don’t be surprised, then, that several sections of ABC of Reading close with homework assignments and class exercises. Did Pound anticipate the writing workshop? “Let the pupils exchange composition papers and see how many and what useless words have been used — how many words convey nothing new.” He notes that the class should also determine how many words actually obscure the writer’s meaning, or seem ambiguous, or appear in some unnatural syntactic order. “Bad art,” Pound said in “The Serious Artist,” “is inaccurate art.” Ideally, writing that matters possesses “a sort of energy … a force transfusing, welding, and unifying.”

  The second half of ABC is devoted to assorted passages — “Exhibits” — from a few of the writers discussed in the first seventy-five or so pages. Be warned: Pound expects you to work your way through some fairly demanding material, often in an archaic dialect. At the same time, he urges you to challenge him: “Let the student hunt for a dozen poems that are different from any of the exhibits, or that introduce some new component, or enlarge his conception of poetry, by bringing in some kind of matter, or mode of expression not yet touched on.” In his later Guide to Kulchur (1938), Pound praised a reader of ABC of Reading who “asked why particular authors (naming them) were omitted and whether someone or other cdn’t replace something else. This, the careful student will observe, is the kind of answer I asked for.”

  Perhaps the most obviously theoretical aspect of ABC lies in its division of poetry into three types: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia. In essence this is poetry as music (e.g., Provençal lyrics such as Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega”), as picture (e.g., Chinese ideograms), and as idea or argument (e.g., poetic satire, knotty modern poems like The Waste Land). Similarly, Pound taxonomizes poets themselves into inventors, masters, diluters, “good writers without s
alient qualities,” “writers of belles lettres,” and the “starters of crazes.”

  In ABC he is most interested in the inventors, those who added some new technique or beauty to the art of poetry: But Pound’s select pantheon may surprise you. Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses, he asserts, is “the most beautiful book in the language” and a poem by the wholly obscure Mark Alexander Boyd (1563—1601) may be “the most beautiful sonnet in the language.” Pound even recommends that poets would do well to study Stendhal and Flaubert, maintaining that verse should be as well written, as exact and natural-seeming, as prose.

  In the end, though, the truly important quality of ABC of Reading remains Pound’s energy and enthusiasm, his highly adrenalized desire to encourage people to explore the literature of the past. ABC itself is a compendium of the kind of inspirational maxims and pronouncements one might tape to the side of a computer monitor or pin to a bulletin board: “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.” “Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.” “The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it.” “One definition of beauty is: aptness to purpose.”

  By the time of Ezra Pound’s death in 1972, the modernist generation had been enshrined as gods. People spoke of “The Age of Eliot.” Hugh Kenner titled his critical masterpiece The Pound Era. An entire Joyce industry was humming along. Sooner or later, such reverent genuflection was bound to provoke an antithetical revaluation. Nowadays, we tend to honor our home boys — like Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams — far more comfortably than the international men of letters, such as Eliot and Pound.

  Yet Ezra Pound — at least the early Pound, up to the mid 1930s — is a writer that readers of the twenty-first century should find deeply appealing. He’s got the piratical bravado of an outlaw hacker, a rebel with a cause. Johnny Depp could play him in the biopic. Moreover, everyone now understands the need to open up the canon to the literatures of other countries and times. The tradition, as Pound reminds us, “is a beauty we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.” But just as importantly, Pound also supplies a corrective to the more sterile aspects of postmodernism: He is a man who takes literature with compelling, needed seriousness.