ABC of Reading Read online

  Proportion, laws of proportion. Pier della Francesca having thought longer, knew more than painters who have not taken the trouble.

  ‘La section d’or’1 certainly helped master architects. But you learn painting by eye, not by algebra. Prosody and melody are attained by the listening ear, not by an index of nomenclatures, or by learning that such and such a foot is called spondee. Give your draughtsman sixty-four stencils of ‘Botticelli’s most usual curves’? And he will make you a masterpiece?

  Beyond which we will never recover the art of writing to be sung until we begin to pay some attention to the sequence, or scale, of vowels in the line, and of the vowels terminating the group of lines in a series.

  1 Traditions of architectural proportion

  INDEX

  Addison, Joseph, 170

  Adolphe (Benjamin Constant), 90

  The Aeneid (Virgil; tr. Douglas), 45, 58, 79, [115-20], 121, [122-23]

  Aeschylus, 46, 47, 103, 204

  Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 46, 47

  Agassiz, Louis, 17-18

  Agricola, Rodolfo, 66

  ‘Aillte’ (music), 54

  Albertus (Gautier), 78

  ‘Alcaeus’ (Landor), 179

  ‘L’Alemanda’ (music), 157

  Alisoun, 144

  Amores (Ovid; tr. Marlowe), 58, 79, 135

  The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 61

  Anne, Queen, 156

  Aristotle, 84

  Arnaut Daniel, 53, 57, 104, 194

  Aucassin et Nicolette (anon.), 194

  Austen, Jane, 61, 72, 89, 177

  Avicenna, 141

  Bach, Johann Sebastian, 43, 201, 203

  Bacon, Roger, 20

  Balfour, Arthur, 141

  Basinio of Parma, 48

  ‘Batsabe sings’ (Peele), 144

  Bayle, Peter, 186

  Beddoes, Thomas, 132

  Beowulf (anon.), 54

  Bertrand de Born, 56

  Bible, 92

  Binyon, Robert Laurence, 202

  Bion, 41, 42, 54

  Bishop of Dunkeld [cf. Douglas, Gavin]

  Boccaccio, 59, 101, 110

  Boileau, Nicolas, 145, 152, 156

  Borchardt, 56

  The Borough (Crabbe), 176-78

  Botticelli, 206

  Bouvard et Pécuchet (Flaubert), 90

  Boyd, Mark Alexander, 134, 173

  Brancusi, 206

  Browning, Robert, 78, 79, 80, 132, 133, 173, 174, 181, 188-91

  Budé, Guillaume, 186

  Bunting, Basil, 36, 92

  Burnt Nial (anon.), 52

  Burton, Robert, 61

  Butler, Samuel, 160-65, 173

  Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 79, 132, 162

  Caesar, Julius, 33

  A Call (F. M. Ford), 90

  Camoens, Luiz de, 72

  Campion, Thomas, 60, 79, 156, 173

  The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 92, [98], [100], [108], [110]

  Canzoni (Arnaut), 194

  Cashel Byron’s Profession (G. B. Shaw), 86

  Catullus, 47, 48, 104

  Cavalcanti, Guido, 14, 57, 60, 73, 85, 90, 96, 104, 140

  Chapman, George, 58

  La Chartreuse de Parme (Stendhal), 90

  Chaucer, Geoffrey, 56, 58, 59, 71, 79, 92, 98-104, 106-14, 115, 132, 142, 167, 173, 187, 206

  Chinese ideograph, 19-22

  El Cid (anon.), 52

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31

  Confucius, 29, 158

  Congreve, William, 170

  Constant, Benjamin, 90

  Corbière, Tristan, 78, 79, 173

  Cowley, Abraham, 162

  Crabbe, George, 73, 79, 172, 173, 175-78, 186

  Crestien de Troyes, 105

  Criterion,74

  Dante, Alighieri, 31, 37, 39, 45, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 71, 101, 103, 197, 202, 204

  Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), 110, 194

  Davray, Henri, 102

  Death of Adonis (anon.), 54

  Debussy, Claude, 24

  Dempsey, Jack, 86-87

  De Ouincey, Thomas, 31

  De Schloezer, Boris, 24

  De Vulgari Eloquio (Dante), 197

  Dickens, Charles, 177

  Diderot, Denis, 186

  ‘Dirce’ (Landor), 185

  Disraeli, Benjamin, 177

  La Divina Commedia (Dante), 191

  Dolci, Carlo, 26

  Don Juan (Byron), 162

  ‘Donna Mi Prega’ (Cavalcanti), 60, 85, 140

  Donne, John, 60, 73, 79, 90, 137-40, 157, 166, 167, 173

  Dorset, Earl of, 79, 159, 162, 173

  Douglas, Gavin, 45, 58, 59, 79, 115-23, 173

  Dowland, John, 151

  Dry Sticks (Landor), 183

  Dryden, John, 167, 168

  ‘The Duke of York’s Statue’ (Landor), 182

  The Dunciad (Pope), 167-71, 172

  ‘The Ecstasy’ (Donne), 60, 79, 137-40

  L’Éducation Sentimentale (Flaubert), 90

  Einstein, Albert, 18

  Eliot, T. S., 113

  Elizabethan tradition, 59, 71, 113, 135

  Elizondo, Fr. José Maria de, 141

  Émaux et Camées (Gautier), 78

  ‘Epithalamium’ (Landor), 179-80

  Erigena, John Scotus, 101

  Ernst, Max, 76

  Essay on the Chinese Written Character (Fenollosa), 18-19

  Euphues (John Lyly), 71

  Euripides, 204

  ‘Exile’s Letter’ (Li Po), 51

  Fabre, Jean Henri, 100

  Fenollosa, Ernest, 18, 19, 20, 22, 96

  Ficino, Marsilio, 100

  Fielding, Henry, 60, 61, 72, 89, 114, 178

  FitzGerald, Edward, 69, 79, 133, 136, 159, 173

  Flaubert, Gustave, 39, 52, 60, 65, 74, 90, 97, 176, 205

  Florio, John, 61

  Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 187

  Ford, Ford Madox, 90

  France, Anatole, 70, 187

  Francesca, Piero della, 206

  Frazer, James George, 100, 103

  Froissart, Jean, 101, 105, 112

  Galileo, 20

  Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 21

  Gautier, Théophile, 78, 79, 173

  Gay, John, 170

  George, Stefan, 55

  Germinie Lacerteux (Goncourts), 77, 90

  Gilbert, William S., 162

  Giordano, Umberto, 159

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 55

  Golding, Arthur, 58, 59, 79, 124-31, 173, 191

  Goldoni, Charles, 186

  ‘Go, Lovely Rose’ (Waller), 155

  Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, 74, 77, 90

  Gongora, Luis de Argote y, 71

  Gower, John, 101-02

  Grettir (anon.), 52

  Guido delle Colonne, 56, 90

  Guillaume de Poictiers, 56, 101

  Hardy, Thomas, 193

  Harvey, Col., 202

  Hegel, Georg, 88

  Heine, Heinrich, 159

  Heinrich von Morungen, 55

  Hemingway, Ernest, 74

  Henry VIII, 144, 156

  Hero and Leander (Marlowe), 72

  Heroic Idylls with Additional Poems (Landor), 183-84

  Heroides (Ovid), 78

  Herrick, Robert, 79, 142, 143, 173

  Hokusai Katsushuka, 206

  Holbach, Paul, 186

  Homer, 29, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 89, 92, 123, 204

  Hood, Thomas, 162

  Horace, 33, 136

  How to Read (Pound), 11, 23, 28, 38, 76, 89

  Hudibras (Butler), 160-65, 172

  Hudson, W. H., 133

  Huxley family, 20

  Ibsen, Henrik, 103, 197

  Ibycus, 47

  ideogrammic method, 26-27, 59, 90, 96

  Iliad (Homer), 58

  Inferno (Dante; tr. Binyon), 202

  Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (Landor), 58-59, 110, 186, 187

  Instigations (Pound), 95

  James, Henry, 43
, 61, 76, 90, 133

  Jamyn, Amadis, 44, 58

  Janequin, Clement, 54

  Jefferson, Thomas, 202

  Jenkins, John, 143, 151

  Johnson, Samuel, 186

  Joyce, James, 113

  Keats, John, 64, 132

  Kennedy-Frasers, 54

  Kipling, Rudyard, 61, 74, 89, 193

  Kodály, Zoltán, 198

  Kreuger, Ivar, 25

  Laforgue, Jules, 38, 74, 78, 79, 173

  Landor, Walter Savage, 58-59, 80, 110, 132, 173, 178, 179-87

  Last Fruit off an Old Tree (Landor), 182

  Laurencie et Lavignac Encycléopdie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire,198

  Lawes, Henry, 60, 151, 155, 156

  Leger, Fernand, 88

  ‘Lenvoy to King Richard’ (Chaucer), 111

  ‘A Letter from Artemisa in the Town to Chloe in the Country’ (Rochester), 172

  Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 21

  Lewis, Wyndham, 113

  Li Po, 51

  logopoeia, 37, 63, 102

  Lombardo, Pietro, 151

  McAlmon, Robert, 90

  Macaulay’s Peerage’ (Landor), 183

  Macbeth (Shakespeare), 122

  Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 90

  Malatesta, 101

  Marconi, Marchese, 25

  Marie de France, 105

  Marlowe, Christopher, 58, 59, 60, 72, 79, 135, 136, 173

  Maupassant, Guy de, 65, 74, 177

  The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy), 193

  Medici, Lorenzo de’, 100

  melopoeia, 37, 42, 48, 52, 56, 61, 63, 102

  Memmi, Simone, 132

  Metamorphoses (Ovid; tr. Golding), 58, 79, 92, [124-25], 126-27, [128-31]

  metre, 142, 157-58, 197-206

  Michelet, Jules, 177

  Milano, Francesco da, 54

  Milton, John, 51, 78, 103, 204

  minnesingers, 55

  ‘Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg’ (Thomas Hood), 162

  Montaigne, Michel de, 61, 192

  Morris, William, 133

  Moschus, 41, 147

  Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 201, 203

  Münch, Gerhart, 23, 54

  Nash, Rev. T. R., 162

  ‘Neiges d’antan’ (Villon), 109

  Noh plays, 92

  North American Review,202

  Odyssey (Homer), 43-44, 58, 85

  Oldham, John, 145

  ‘Old Style’ (Landor), 185

  Omar Khayyám, 69, 136, 159

  On the Common Tongue (Dante), 71

  Ovid (P. Ouidius Naso), 33, 45, 48, 58, 78, 79, 92, 98, 127, 135

  The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (eds. H. J. Grierson & G. Bullough), 140

  The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (ed. E. K. Chambers), 120

  Paris, Gaston, 11

  ‘Pastime and good company’ (Henry VIII), 144

  ‘A Pastoral In Imitation of the Greek of Moschus Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester’ (anon.), 147-153, 154

  Peele, George, 144

  Perugino, 134

  Petrarch, Francis, 59, 103, 110

  Petronius Arbiter, Gaius, 110

  phanopoeia, 37, 42, 52, 56, 63, 102

  Picasso, Pablo, 154

  Pisanello, 30

  Pisistratus, 92

  pitch, 197, 198

  Plato, 110

  Platonism, 140

  Poe, Edgar Allan, 79

  Poems and Epigrams (Landor), 180-81

  ‘Poikilothron’ (Sappho), 47

  Pope, Alexander, 73, 79, 152, 158, 162, 165, 166-171, 172, 173, 175, 176

  Prior, Matthew, 170

  Propertius, Sextus, 38, 48, 118

  Provençal tradition, 52-54, 55-57, 69, 101, 104, 109, 111, 113, 142, 157

  Puccini, Giacomo, 159

  Purgatorio (Dante), 96

  Quattrocento, 48, 132

  Rabelais, 61, 186

  Ravel, Maurice, 24

  Reinach, Salomon, 11

  Renaissance, 48, 132

  Renan, Ernest, 191

  rhyme, 142, 163

  rhythm [cf. metre]

  Richardson, Samuel, 178

  Richter, Friedrich, 200

  Rimbaud, Arthur, 78, 79, 173

  Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 79, 145-46, 147, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 172, 173

  Rockefeller, John D., 25

  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 80, 105, 133, 174

  Le Rouge et le noir (Stendhal), 90

  The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald), 69, 79, 133

  Rudge, Olga, 23

  The Sacred Fount (Henry James), 90

  Salammbô (Flaubert), 74

  Salel, 58

  Sansoni, Luigi, 23

  Sappho, 41, 47, 48

  Sauzay, 201

  Schelling, Felix, 60, 103

  ‘Seafarer’ (anon.), 51, 52, 54, 58

  Seneca, 156, 159

  A Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 89, 178

  Seres, Willyam, 127

  ‘The Serious Artist’ (Pound), 96-97

  Serly, Tibor, 198

  Shakespeare, 33, 39, 51, 58, 59, 60, 71, 72, 79, 99-103, 106, 108, 114, 127, 132, 136, 173, 187, 202, 204

  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 132

  Sidgwick, J. B., 59

  Sirventes, 69, 157

  Smollett, Tobias, 178

  Socrates, 110

  sonnet, 134, 157

  Sophocles, 46

  Sordello, 55, 56, 57, 157, 191

  Spenser, Edmund, 151

  Spinoza, Baruch, 88

  Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 60, 74, 90, 97, 176, 186

  Sterne, Laurence, 13, 89, 178

  Stravinsky (De Schloezer), 24

  Sullivan, Arthur, 162

  Swift, Jonathan, 168

  Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 77-78, 80, 105, 132

  Tacitus, 33, 70

  Ta Hio (Confucius), 29, 58

  Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 132, 202

  Theocritus, 78

  ‘They flee from me’ (Wyatt), 144

  Tilden, Bill, 75

  ‘To His Sacred Majesty On His Restoration’ (Rochester), 146

  Tom Jones (Fielding), 89, 178

  Torquemada, 95

  Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 89, 178

  Trois contes (Flaubert), 90

  Trollope, Anthony, 76, 89, 90

  Tunney, Gene, 86

  Tura, Cosimo, 26

  Umewaka Minoru, 92

  Urquhart, Thomas, 61

  Valla, Lorenzo, 186

  Ventadour, 55

  Villon, François, 56, 57, 96, 104-05, 109, 173

  Vinci, Leonardo da, 201

  ‘Violets’ (Robert Herrick), 142

  Virgil, 44, 45, 58, 107, [118], 121, 123

  La Vita Nuova (Dante; tr. Borchardt), 55

  Voltaire, 60, 176, 186

  Vorticist manifesto of 1914, 76

  Wallace, Edgar, 44, 89

  Waller, Edmund, 60, 79, 154-55, 173

  Walsinghame, 144

  Walther von der Vogelweide, 55

  ‘The Wanderer’ (anon.), 96

  ‘Welcome to Charles’ (Rochester), 154

  Wells, H. G., 141

  Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 133

  Whitman. Walt, 79, 173, 192

  Whittaker, William Gillies, 143

  Wordsworth, William, 73, 77-78, 132

  Wyatt, Thomas, 144

  Yeats, William Butler, 44, 80, 96, 99, 159, 197-98

  Yellow Book, 71

  Young, William, 143, 151

  EZRA POUND

  AVAILABLE FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  A B C of Reading

  The Cantos of Ezra Pound

  The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan

  Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound

  Confucius (Translations)

  Confucius to Cummings (Anthology)

  Diptych Rome—London

  A Draft of XXX Cantos

  Elektra (Translation)

  Ezra Pound and Dorothy Sh
akespear 1909-1914

  Ezra Pound and Music

  Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts

  Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir

  Guide to Kulchur

  Literary Essays

  New Selected Poems and Translations

  Pavannes and Divagations

  Personae

  The Pisan Cantos

  Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship (Letters)

  Pound/Joyce: Letters & Essays

  Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis

  Pound/The Little Review: Letters

  Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters

  Selected Cantos

  Selected Letters 1907-1941

  Selected Prose 1909-1965

  The Spirit of Romance

  Translations

  A Walking Tour in Southern France

  Women of Trachis (Translation)

  Copyright © 1934 by Ezra Pound

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Michael Dirda

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published in 1934. First published in the New Directions Classics series in 1951, then as New Directions Paperbook 89 in 1960. Reissued with a new introduction by Michael Dirda (New Directions Paperbook 1186) in 2010.

  Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972.

  [A B C of reading]

  ABC of reading / by Ezra Pound; introduction by Michael Dirda.

  p. cm. -- (New Directions paperbook; 1186)

  Originally published: 1934.

  “First published as New Directions paperbook 89 in 1960. Reissued with a new introduction … in 2010”--T.p. verso.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-8112-2316-4 (e-book)

  1. Literature--Study and teaching. 2. Literature--History and criticism. 3. Poetry. 4. English poetry--History and criticism. I. Title.

  PN59.P6 2010

  807--dc22 2010021429

  New Directions books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011