The right way to study literature

Introduction. What is poetry? Why is clear writing a virtue? Why is the public's taste always bad? Where do myths come from? Ezra Pound, one of the most influential and controversial poets of the 20th century, answered all these questions and more. Read on 👇

What is poetry? For Pound, poetry is “inspired mathematics.” It gives us equations not for geometric figures like “triangles or spheres” but for “human emotions.” Poetry is a complex but systematic and knowable process via which certain input gets to a certain output.

Good art is art that talks PRECISELY about something important: “Good art however ‘immoral’ is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”

Pound on why clear writing that commits to concrete action is important: When language becomes “slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated,” then the “whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.”

Pound on why the taste of the public is always bad: “The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'.” The urge to be fashionable erodes taste.

The job of an artist is to abet his audience in their "escape from dullness." What a good writer must do: "relieve, refresh, revive the mind of the reader - with some form of ecstasy, by some splendor of thought, some presentation of sheer beauty, some lightning tum of phrase."

Myths express real & universal spiritual experiences in the garb of stories: “I believe in a sort of permanent basis in humanity, that is to say, I believe that Greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others.”

Pound on where bad writing comes from: “Bad writing, or a great deal of it, drips down from an abstract received ' idea' or 'generality' held with fanaticism (twin beast with personal vanity) by men who NEVER take in concrete detail.” Aversion to details is a literary red flag.

Pound on the right way to study literature: “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one slide or specimen with another.”

Pound on how the environment influences a people's language: "Different climates have different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different ratios between impulse & unwillingness, different constructions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language."