Ezra Pound in 1914
The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognises his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.
A pleasure of aging: to reconsider books that have helped to form your attitudes. Another: not having to talk for an hour.
Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934 – but I read it in the early 1960s) could be described as an eccentric textbook, but it’s more of a manifesto. It comprises a little generalisation about literature, a lot of examples of poetry – almost an anthology – some commentary and a reading list.
Pound thought it necessary to have a standard, to read the best that has been done in its kind. What complicates this goal for him is that no one language holds a monopoly of literary virtue. For Pound, a real understanding of poetry requires a swag of languages (Chinese, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Provencal and more). Cross-cultural comparison holds no terrors. To see that Greek drama is not all that good, he advises you to read Homer. Don’t bother with German – he has read it all for you, and found nothing standard-setting. The monoglot gets a look-in. Pound concedes that you can get most of it by reading ‘authorised’ translations such as Pound’s own of Seafarer, Golding’s Ovid or Gavin Douglas’s Virgil. But the strongest impression left by the book – on one seventeen year old reader, at least – is that anyone without a working knowledge of half-a-dozen languages is a dabbler.
As Pound might say: balls. But at seventeen, the book conjured up a marvellous, if deeply confusing landscape – all those exotic peaks waiting to be conquered – and the promise of initiation into the mysteries of the craft, all presented far more enticingly than the plodding textbooks with their pother about iambic pentameter. I suppose I was open to the idea of a cosmopolitan canon because of my immersion in music ?
Quite apart from its grandiose claims, the book is a bit of a mess. Some of the comments on the texts are enigmatic, most no more than jottings, all of the arguments are flat assertions and there’s a good deal of intimidating but bogus scholarship. I often felt, re-reading it, like a schoolboy lectured to by a fascinating, but slightly mad uncle.
The tone of the book is hilariously dogmatic. Read for yourself, he repeatedly urges, ignore the textbooks, shrug off received opinion, do the hard yards, get up the languages and read for yourself. Then you’ll see I’m right. This is the double-bind that made two generations of English students bite their fingernails.
Despite all this, if someone wanted to begin to read poetry seriously, there are worse books. Pound may be dogmatic, but he also cares passionately about the craft as well as the art of poetry, and almost anyone would profit from a careful reading of his examples. Today, when even first year course descriptions routinely speak of gender, race, class and identity, when the drift is towards treating creative work as ‘evidence’, this is again the stress we need.
A few of many good things.
His kinds of writers: inventors, masters, diluters, good writers without salient qualities (those ‘fortunate enough to be born when the language is in good working order’), writers of belles-lettres, the starters of crazes. (39)
His advice to seek out the earliest example of a style or an innovation, to see the colour pure before it’s mixed with others.
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ‘em alive.
In the spirit of which, when I am asked what should be done about Shakespeare in schools, I tend to say drop him. (It is probably time to extend the ban to universities. ) “But then they’ll never read him . . .”; as if a mountaineer scrambling around in the Grampians had never heard of Everest. Those who can read him will seek him out. Those who can’t are spared their sufferings. Does it ever occur to you that declaring someone official literature might have a downside? Who don’t you trust – Shakespeare? serious readers? What makes you bother about unserious readers?