Rashed's View

I ran across a marvelous little book at the Half Price Books store in Rice Village – Ezra Pound’s ‘ABC of Reading‘. It is a short book (about 200 pages) written in 1934 (prior to his days in Italy) that expands his earlier (1933) essay on ’Row to Read.‘ Pound discusses how to read and enjoy poetry. Part I of the book lays out Pound’s ideas in a very sharp and passionate style – telling what good poetry is. Part II has the ‘exhibits’ – pieces of poems by the “land mark” poets, and some commentary by Pound on these pieces - showing what good poetry is. The book is not a formal, logical build up of ideas – it is an informal, jagged kaleidoscope of thoughts. His primary points are that

1. Create the measuring scale: you must read the greatest poets to understand the overall scale of how good poetry can be; the scale against which to measure all other poetry. This scale is the starting point. He calls this the “compass, sextant, or land marks”.
2. Read the masters: you must do it yourself, and not read critiques by others. “This is … the RIGHT WAY to study poetry, or literature, or painting… If you want to find out something about painting… LOOK at the pictures.”

The whole book is peppered with interesting observations and commentary. A sampling of the ones I found particularly interesting are listed below:

• “The critic who does not make a personal statement regarding measurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men’s results.”
• “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
• “Language is the main means of human communication. If an animal’s nervous system does not transmit sensations and stimuli, the animal atrophies. If a nations literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”
• “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”
• “Artists are the antennae; an animal that neglects the warning of its perceptions needs very great powers of resistance if it is to survive. A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives.”

Pound recommends that in poetry one should start by looking for different ways to project meaning into words, rather than just specific comments. He mentions three:

• Phanopoeia: throw a visual image onto the reader’s imagination
• Melopoeia: charge a word by sound
• Logopoeia: use words in a special context the readers are accustomed to (based on previous readings) – this is a more sophisticated way to project meaning

Another thing he suggests the reader should look for is to see what motive underlies a given piece – “to teach, to move or to delight.” Otherwise the critic would be lead “to obscure, to bamboozle or mislead, and to bore.” I got much out of the book. To test my enjoyment, I spent 3 hours at the bookstore reading poems. It was great. If you read poetry, it would be a worthwhile read.