by Ezra Pound
Ambitious fiction and poetry — “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” — matter in this increasingly noisy and trivialized world. Pound once said that “beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another,” and in this, too, alas, he may have foreseen the internet generation. Like George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language,” Pound repeatedly underscores the importance of honest, efficient language for human communication. “If a nation’s literature declines,” he writes, “the nation atrophies and decays.” No wonder that one of Pound’s favorite Chinese ideograms, “Ching Ming,” is the symbol for precise verbal definition, for calling a thing by its proper name.
ABC of Reading isn’t only a guide to books, then, or just an instruction manual for would-be writers. It reminds us that we need literature to deepen our lives, that poetry’s “luminous details” bring us joy and beauty and understanding. A great book, said Pound, is like “a ball of light in one’s hand.”
A B C of Reading
How to Study Poetry
THE present book is intended to meet the need for fuller and simpler explanation of the method outlined in How to Read. How to Read may be considered as a controversial pamphlet summarizing the more active or spiky parts of the author’s earlier critical skirmishing, and taking count of an enemy. The present pages should be impersonal enough to serve as a text-book. The author hopes to follow the tradition of Gaston Paris and S. Reinach, that is, to produce a text-book that can also be read ‘for pleasure as well as profit’ by those no longer in school; by those who have not been to school; or by those who in their college days suffered those things which most of my own generation suffered.
A private word to teachers and professors will be found toward the end of the volume. I am not idly sowing thorns in their path. I should like to make even their lot and life more exhilarating and to save even them from unnecessary boredom in class-room.
Warning
1 There is a longish dull stretch shortly after the beginning of the book. The student will have to endure it. I am at that place trying by all means to avoid ambiguity, in the hope of saving the student’s time later.
2 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.
Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the
body to conceal the defects of the mind.
LAURENCE STERNE
3 The harsh treatment here accorded a number of meritorious writers is not aimless, but proceeds from a firm conviction that the only way to keep the best writing in circulation, or to ‘make the best poetry popular’, is by drastic separation of the best from a great mass of writing that has been long considered of value, that has over-weighted all curricula, and that is to be blamed for the very pernicious current idea that a good book must be of necessity a dull one.
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
An Italian state examiner, jolted by my edition of Cavalcanti, expressed admiration at the almost ultra-modernity of Guido’s language.
Ignorant men of genius are constantly rediscovering ‘laws’ of art which the academics had mislaid or hidden.
The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music: but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
Nunc est bibendum
Nunc pede libero
Pulsanda tellus.
SECTION ONE
Chapter One
1
We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ‘the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.
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.
No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:
A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
Post-Graduate Student: ‘That’s only a sunfish.’
Agassiz: ‘I know that. Write a description of it.’
After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.
By this method modern science has arisen, not on the narrow edge of mediaeval logic suspended in a vacuum.
‘Science does not consist in inventing a number of more or less abstract entities corresponding to the number of things you wish to find out’, says a French commentator on Einstein. I don’t know whether that clumsy translation of a long French sentence is clear to the general reader.
The first definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character.
The complete despicability of official philosophic thought, and, if the reader will really think carefully of what I am trying to tell him, the most stinging insult and at the same time convincing proof of the general nullity and incompetence of organized intellectual life in America, England, their universities in general, and their learned publications at large, could be indicated by a narrative of the difficulties I encountered in getting Fenollosa’s essay printed at all.
A text-book is no place for anything that could be interpreted or even misinterpreted as a personal grievance.
Let us say that the editorial minds, and those of men in power in the literary and educational bureaucracy for the fifty years preceding 1934, have not always differed very greatly from that of the tailor Blodgett who prophesied that: ‘sewing machines will never come into general use’.
Fenollosa’s essay was perhaps too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language.
The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows:
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a ‘colour’.
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth.
In the middle ages when there wasn’t any material science, as we now understand it, when human knowledge could not make automobiles run, or electricity carry language through the air, etc., etc., in short,
when learning consisted in little more than splitting up of terminology, there was a good deal of care for terminology, and the general exactitude in the use of abstract terms may have been (probably was) higher.
I mean a mediaeval theologian took care not to define a dog in terms that would have applied just as well to a dog’s tooth or its hide, or the noise it makes when lapping water; but all your teachers will tell you that science developed more rapidly after Bacon had suggested the direct examination of phenomena, and after Galileo and others had stopped discussing things so much, and had begun really to look at them, and to invent means (like the telescope) of seeing them better.
The most useful living member of the Huxley family has emphasized the fact that the telescope wasn’t merely an idea, but that it was very definitely a technical achievement.
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry’, as distinct from that of ‘philosophic discussion’, and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing.
To go back to the beginning of history, you probably know that there is spoken language and written language, and that there are two kinds of written language, one based on sound and the other on sight.
You speak to an animal with a few simple noises and gestures. Lévy-Bruhl’s account of primitive languages in Africa records languages that are still bound up with mimicry and gesture.
The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures.
Gaudier Brzeska, who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY. He said, ‘Of course, you can see it’s a horse’ (or a wing or whatever).
In tables showing primitive Chinese characters in one column and the present ‘conventionalized’ signs in another, anyone can see how the ideogram for man or tree or sunrise developed, or ‘was simplified from’, or was reduced to the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise.
But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it?
He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?
He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of
ROSE CHERRY
IRON RUST FLAMINGO
That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.
The Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.
(If ideogram had developed in England, the writers would possibly have substituted the front side of a robin, or something less exotic than a flamingo.)
Fenollosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC; simply couldn’t help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of English type might very well not stay poetic.
He died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a ‘method’.
This is nevertheless the RIGHT WAY to study poetry, or literature, or painting. It is in fact the way the more intelligent members of the general public DO study painting. If you want to find out something about painting you go to the National Gallery, or the Salon Carré, or the Brera, or the Prado, and LOOK at the pictures.
For every reader of books on art, 1,000 people go to LOOK at the paintings. Thank heaven!
LABORATORY CONDITIONS
A SERIES of coincidences has permitted me (1933) to demonstrate the How to Read thesis in a medium nearer to poetry than painting is. A group of serious musicians (Gerhart Münch, Olga Rudge, Luigi Sansoni), a town hall at our disposition (Rapallo), we presented among other things the following programmes:
Oct. 10.
From the Chilesotti MSS. Münch transcription: Francesco da Milano: ‘Canzone degli Uccelli’, recast from Janequin.
Giovanni Terzi: Suite di Ballo.
Corelli: Sonata in La maj., two violins and piano.
J. S. Bach. Sonata in Do maj. ditto.
Debussy: Sonata per piano e violino.
Dec. 5.
Collezione Chilesotti: Severi: due Arie.
Roncalli: Preludio,
Gigua, Passacaglia.
Bach: Toccata (piano solo, ed. Busoni).
Bach: Concerto Re maj. for two violins and piano.
Ravel: Sonata per violino e pianoforte.
There was nothing fortuitous. The point of this experiment is that everyone present at the two concerts now knows a great deal more about the relations, the relative weight, etc., of Debussy and Ravel than they possibly could have found out by reading ALL the criticisms that have ever been written of both.
The best volume of musical criticism I have ever encountered is Boris De Schloezer’s Stravinsky. What do I know after reading it that I didn’t know before?
I am aware of De Schloezer’s mental coherence, and thoroughness. I am delighted by one sentence, possibly the only one in the book that I remember (approximately): ‘Melody is the most artificial thing in music’, meaning that it is furthest removed from anything the composer finds THERE, ready in nature, needing only direct imitation or copying. It is therefore the root, the test, etc.
This is an aphorism, a general statement. For me it is profoundly true. It can be used as a measuring-rod to Stravinsky or any other composer. BUT for actual knowledge of Stravinsky? Where De Schloezer refers to works I have heard, I get most, perhaps all, of his meaning.
Where he refers to works I have not heard, I get his ‘general idea’ but I acquire no real knowledge.
My final impression is that he was given a rather poor case, that he has done his best for his client, and ultimately left Stravinsky flat on his back, although he has explained why the composer went wrong, or couldn’t very well have done otherwise.
2
ANY general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act.
The same applies with cheques against knowledge. If Marconi says something about ultra-short waves it MEANS something. Its meaning can only be properly estimated by someone who KNOWS.
You do not accept a stranger’s cheques without reference. In writing, a man’s ‘name’ is his reference. He has, after a time, credit. It may be sound, it may be like the late Mr. Kreuger’s.
The verbal manifestation on any bank cheque is very much like that on any other.
Your cheque, if good, means ultimately delivery of something you want.
An abstract or general statement is GOOD if it be ultimately found to correspond with the facts.
BUT no layman can tell at sight whether it is good or bad.
Hence (omitting various intermediate steps) … hence the almost stationary condition of knowledge throughout the middle ages. Abstract arguments didn’t get mankind rapidly forward, or rapidly extend the borders of knowledge.
THE IDEOGRAMMIC METHOD OR THE METHOD OF SCIENCE
HANG a painting by Carlo Dolci beside a Cosimo Tura. You cannot prevent Mr. Buggins from preferring the former, but you can very seriously impede his setting up a false tradition of teaching on the assumption that Tura has never existed, or that the qualities of the Tura are nonexistent or outside the sc
ope of the possible.
A general statement is valuable only in REFERENCE to the known objects or facts.
Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is ‘true’, it leaves his mouth or pen without any great validity. He doesn’t KNOW what he is saying. That is, he doesn’t know it or mean it in anything like the degree that a man of experience would or does. Thus a very young man can be quite ‘right’ without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn’t know.
One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one WAS right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say seventeen or twenty-three.
. . . . .
This doesn’t in the least rule out the uses of logic, or of good guesses, or of intuitions and total perceptions, or of ‘seeing how the thing HAD TO BE’.
It has, however, a good deal to do with the efficiency of verbal manifestation, and with the transmittibility of a conviction.
Chapter Two