Ezra Pound - ABC of Reading (1934)

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Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Ezra Pound
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Ezra Pound
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Ezra Pound
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.

Ezra Pound
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Ezra Pound
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

Ezra Pound
It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

Ezra Pound
And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Ezra Pound
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Ezra Pound
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Ezra Pound
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.

Ezra Pound
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Ezra Pound
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 17 or 23.

Ezra Pound
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.

Ezra Pound
AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

Ezra Pound
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

Ezra Pound
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

Ezra Pound
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

Ezra Pound
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.

Ezra Pound
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Ezra Pound
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

Ezra Pound
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

Ezra Pound