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Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
This collection of essays, edited by Pound's friend and fellow poet T.S. Eliot, contains essays from five earlier volumes: Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations(1920), How to Read(1931), Make it New(1934), and Polite Essays(1937). The thirty-three essays contained in this collection are separated into three categories: The Art of Poetry, The Tradition, and Contemporaries. These essays showcase the range of Pound's interests, with topics ranging from modernist poetry to Japanese iconography, troubadour songs, and much more. Pound's influence on the modernist movement and literature as a whole makes this collection an important piece of literary history.
With an introduction by T.S. Eliot.
With an introduction by T.S. Eliot.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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About the author
Ezra Pound
507 books1,017 followersEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
December 23, 2017
There were aspects of each essay in the collection (edited by T.S. Eliot) which glimmered with stunning poetic vision. There were also serial rants, an ugly approach to pedagogy which illuminates if not anticipates some of the more malignant spiel Pound would later deliver for Mussolini on he radio. I'm listening to one of those ugly broadcasts right now as I type.
Pound's meticulous analysis of meter and melody are always undermined by his frothing certainty. mystic fog shrouds much of history. Pounder parts this gloom with his beloved troubadours but then collapses into a wheezing bigotry. I would recommend these essays especially those on Henry James and James Joyce. It places one in an awkward situation. One can also be troubled by remembering a childhood affection or the comedy albums of Bill Cosby.
Pound's meticulous analysis of meter and melody are always undermined by his frothing certainty. mystic fog shrouds much of history. Pounder parts this gloom with his beloved troubadours but then collapses into a wheezing bigotry. I would recommend these essays especially those on Henry James and James Joyce. It places one in an awkward situation. One can also be troubled by remembering a childhood affection or the comedy albums of Bill Cosby.
February 8, 2008
Pound. The bottom line for me is that his poetry is great as an idea, while his prose is great as an experience - that is, actually great. The essays in this book and elsewhere (the letters too) are so entertaining: a cross between Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Flaubert, maybe the Goncourt brothers. Pound's acidity is aggravating at times, but this is part of the fun and anyway maybe we need to be aggravated (he always ends up paying us for it anyway). In the end, he continues a tradition of American essay writing that begins with Emerson: peripatetic, condensed attempts to lasso sentences together in an attempt to make a symbol, image, figure, whatever you want to call it.
August 24, 2023
L'opera è suddivisa in tre sezioni: l'Arte della poesia, Classici e Contemporanei, ognuna delle quali contiene differenti saggi pubblicati da Pound perlopiù tra gli anni 10 e 20. Nella prima sezione sono presenti saggi concernenti soprattutto teoria poetica: qui si evince particolarmente l'idea alla base della creazione poetica Poundiana, incentrata sulla assoluta precisione e chiarezza della parola , e sulla fondamentale importanza della musicalità. Le altre due sezioni sono di pura critica letteraria: tuttavia non è una critica canonica, Pound trae spunto dall' attività letteraria di svariati autori per ribadire le proprie posizioni letterarie, per evidenziare criticismi e perplessità insiti non soltanto nel singolo autore, ma nell'intero panorama letterario. Ciò sfocia in una critica spesso arcigna, polemica non unicamente verso gli autori stessi, ma soprattutto verso editori, giornalisti, rei secondo Pound della pochezza e della stagnazione letteraria di inizio Novecento (figuriamoci cosa direbbe oggi...). Alcuni scritti son davvero brevi, altri sono delle vere e proprie piccole monografie, come nel caso dei saggi su Arnaut Daniel e Guido Cavalcanti: in essi non affiora unicamente la saggezza poetica di Pound, ma anche la sua formidabile conoscenza di materie ancellari alla sua idea di poesia, come musica, scultura, filologia ecc. Avrei preferito maggiormente la presenza di ulteriori saggi di ars poetica, ma l'opera resta comunque assolutamente illuminante.
February 28, 2022
"We have not realized to what extent a renaissance is a thing made - a thing made by conscious propaganda."
This sums up entirely Pound's approach to criticism and literary theory: his essays are battle plans, his commentaries targeted lines of attack on the writing and thinking he finds deficient. The excitement and value of reading Pound arises from this intensely polemical tone; to read his criticism is to come away with the sense of a man at war with the sentiments and establishment of his time. Indeed it often feels (given his key involvement in almost every modernist publication/movement/social network) like he is pummelling white-knuckled the outmoded literature of his time into shape. Despite not at all being able to keep up, I looove the fact that he dickishly refuses to translate the great paragraphs of Latin, Greek, langue d'oc, German etc that he quotes at length in his essays; as he is at pains to point out, literature is unavoidably and crucially international, and to limit yourself to a single language is to kneecap any understanding of cultural exchange and influence. ((so so so much more I wanna say and quote so willl come back to this asap))
September 26, 2022
Pound writes sentences so surprising that they push back the hair on your head (and sometimes rectify your loom). My favourites are the three essays on his dear friend James Joyce, and the clearsighted appraisal of what in Lawrence’s verse exalts. The Troubadour essay, the Henry James essay, and the inaugural “how to read” are classics, instant and perennial.
August 16, 2022
Insightful analyses of poetic techniques. Grandiose oracular pronouncements. Book reviews.
August 20, 2023
The essays were excellent, and for the most part there was a lot to be taken away from this.
But there’s a major problem - he has possibly the biggest ego of the 20th cent. and the way he talks about the layperson or non-critical reader is horrifying. Fascism seeps from all corners of his nonfiction.
Still, I think there are a lot of important things to be taken from his work, so long as you can stand the character behind it.
Favorites:
“The Serious Artist”
“D.H. Lawrence”
“The Prose Tradition in Verse”
But there’s a major problem - he has possibly the biggest ego of the 20th cent. and the way he talks about the layperson or non-critical reader is horrifying. Fascism seeps from all corners of his nonfiction.
Still, I think there are a lot of important things to be taken from his work, so long as you can stand the character behind it.
Favorites:
“The Serious Artist”
“D.H. Lawrence”
“The Prose Tradition in Verse”
August 19, 2020
An interesting collection of critical essays ranging from general essays about the art of poetry to specific forms, especially the Provencal poets. The essays on Pound's contemporaries, Joyce, Lewis, D.H. Lawrence etc., are of particular interest.
Pound has a very idiosyncratic view of literature and his erudition pours forth in every insight. Most illuminating!
Pound has a very idiosyncratic view of literature and his erudition pours forth in every insight. Most illuminating!
February 13, 2017
Eliot has trifurcated Pound's essays conveniently: (1) The Art of Poetry, (2) The Tradition, and (3) Contemporaries. Included in the back is a profitable index with authors, works, poetic devices (such as 'assonance'), and subjects (such as 'American fiction, the mediocrity of').
Pound's first three essays alone — 'A Retrospect' (1918), 'How to Read' (1929), and 'The Serious Artist' (1913) — demonstrate why he is one of the 20th century's greatest critics. These essays are invaluable not only because of their erudition, but also because of their impact on poetry. The opening essay, 'A Retrospect', is a slim 19 pages that nevertheless contains the ideas with which Pound separated 20th century poetry from 19th century poetry. In 'How to Read', the second crucial essay, Pound posits forth his three kinds of poetry: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia, which (as the title clarifies) are serviceable not just to poets, but also to the 'casual reader' (a term Pound uses often). Here—and later in 'The Palette' (p. 215)—Pound includes his recommended reading list: Homer, Sappho, absolutely no Virgil, all of Catullus, Dante, The Sea-farer (for a taste of Anglo-Saxon), the Troubadours, no French poetry save Villon (read French prose instead, he councils), all of Confucius (to understand the East), Chaucer, Shakespeare, no Milton (for he is ‘the worst sort of poison' [216]), and no American poetry whatsoever. (This was, mind you, before Eliot was published.)
Can one really ignore Virgil? Can Confucius represent every non-western idea? Of course not. It is in these exaggerated claims that one sees flashes of outmoded criticism. But it was precisely that brilliance and grandiloquence that lionised Pound and made him a critic who could not be ignored.
Pound devotes over 100 pages to the troubadours of Provence, whose Old Occitan poetry, he writes, impacted modern European prosody more than the classics. Here, too, Pound exaggerates his point, but his effect is achieved: 'my purpose in all this is to suggest to the casual reader that the Middle Ages did not exist in the tapestry alone', he writes. 'Any study of European poetry is unsound if it does not commence with a study of that art in Provence' (101). Pound's argument is correct: iambs, stanzas, and rhyme were truly developed in Old Occitan songs. Pound even translates 32 pages worth of important troubadour poetry for 'the casual reader' to imbibe. Essays such as this also frustrate, though: Pound claims to write for the 'casual' or 'general' reader, yet in the essays he refuses to translate 12th century Old Occitan poetry. It is only at the end—removed from the context of quotation—that the casual reader is permitted to read the troubadours in English. (Eliot, as editor, should have fixed this.) To not translate hundreds of lines of poetry in foreign languages is either through carelessness or, far more likely, a sly patronisation of 'the general reader'.
Also in Part Two is 'Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer' (c. 1918), which details early English, Latin, and French translations of Homer (again, only in the original languages). Pound goes line-by-line through centuries of Homeric reception examining how translators failed or succeeded in translating the melopoeia, logopoeia, and phanopoeia (melody, prosody, and imagery) of Greek. These are edifying and carefully executed reception studies, though the notion of reception studies would receive little attention until 49 years later when Hans Robert Jauss addressed the University of Constance and called for a shift in classics towards Rezeptionsästhetik. Such auguries are commonly found in these essays: either Pound anticipates trends in criticism or he makes trends.
Pound’s fascination with East Asia appears in multiple essays, for instance. He saw the globalisation of China as 'a treasure to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from the Greeks' (218). It's a creative and hopeful parallel, albeit one not even Pound himself could achieve with the Cantos. Yet more often than not, Pound's essays seem to have made rather than predict the 20th century. Despite a prickliness of style that has been highlighted by time, Pound's essays alone will preserve him as a canonical author.
Pound's first three essays alone — 'A Retrospect' (1918), 'How to Read' (1929), and 'The Serious Artist' (1913) — demonstrate why he is one of the 20th century's greatest critics. These essays are invaluable not only because of their erudition, but also because of their impact on poetry. The opening essay, 'A Retrospect', is a slim 19 pages that nevertheless contains the ideas with which Pound separated 20th century poetry from 19th century poetry. In 'How to Read', the second crucial essay, Pound posits forth his three kinds of poetry: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia, which (as the title clarifies) are serviceable not just to poets, but also to the 'casual reader' (a term Pound uses often). Here—and later in 'The Palette' (p. 215)—Pound includes his recommended reading list: Homer, Sappho, absolutely no Virgil, all of Catullus, Dante, The Sea-farer (for a taste of Anglo-Saxon), the Troubadours, no French poetry save Villon (read French prose instead, he councils), all of Confucius (to understand the East), Chaucer, Shakespeare, no Milton (for he is ‘the worst sort of poison' [216]), and no American poetry whatsoever. (This was, mind you, before Eliot was published.)
Can one really ignore Virgil? Can Confucius represent every non-western idea? Of course not. It is in these exaggerated claims that one sees flashes of outmoded criticism. But it was precisely that brilliance and grandiloquence that lionised Pound and made him a critic who could not be ignored.
Pound devotes over 100 pages to the troubadours of Provence, whose Old Occitan poetry, he writes, impacted modern European prosody more than the classics. Here, too, Pound exaggerates his point, but his effect is achieved: 'my purpose in all this is to suggest to the casual reader that the Middle Ages did not exist in the tapestry alone', he writes. 'Any study of European poetry is unsound if it does not commence with a study of that art in Provence' (101). Pound's argument is correct: iambs, stanzas, and rhyme were truly developed in Old Occitan songs. Pound even translates 32 pages worth of important troubadour poetry for 'the casual reader' to imbibe. Essays such as this also frustrate, though: Pound claims to write for the 'casual' or 'general' reader, yet in the essays he refuses to translate 12th century Old Occitan poetry. It is only at the end—removed from the context of quotation—that the casual reader is permitted to read the troubadours in English. (Eliot, as editor, should have fixed this.) To not translate hundreds of lines of poetry in foreign languages is either through carelessness or, far more likely, a sly patronisation of 'the general reader'.
Also in Part Two is 'Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer' (c. 1918), which details early English, Latin, and French translations of Homer (again, only in the original languages). Pound goes line-by-line through centuries of Homeric reception examining how translators failed or succeeded in translating the melopoeia, logopoeia, and phanopoeia (melody, prosody, and imagery) of Greek. These are edifying and carefully executed reception studies, though the notion of reception studies would receive little attention until 49 years later when Hans Robert Jauss addressed the University of Constance and called for a shift in classics towards Rezeptionsästhetik. Such auguries are commonly found in these essays: either Pound anticipates trends in criticism or he makes trends.
Pound’s fascination with East Asia appears in multiple essays, for instance. He saw the globalisation of China as 'a treasure to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from the Greeks' (218). It's a creative and hopeful parallel, albeit one not even Pound himself could achieve with the Cantos. Yet more often than not, Pound's essays seem to have made rather than predict the 20th century. Despite a prickliness of style that has been highlighted by time, Pound's essays alone will preserve him as a canonical author.
April 23, 2025
Objective analysis and self-obsession consummate to produce Modernism. If you are interested in modernism and wish to understand it as an artistic movement or a cultural moment, Pound's essays provide insight.
June 20, 2017
Es el primer libro que leo exclusivamente dedicado a la crítica literaria por tanto no tengo un punto de referencia para comparar la calidad de los ensayos. Sin embargo, lo que puedo dar como opinión es una sensación muy placentera de haber tenido la oportunidad de acercarme y conocer una gran cantidad de poetas, escritores y artistas hasta ahora desconocidos.
Ezra Pound me ha dejado atónito con su amplio conocimiento, con su tenaz dedicación, había leído algunos poemas suyos pero no tenía idea de que fuera un crítico tan consagrado a su oficio.
El libro, consta de dos partes y 26 ensayos, que están organizados inicialmente en un orden cronológico que permiten mejor la comprensión del mismo, se inicia en la edad media y se llega a algunos ensayos de autores del siglo XX como Joyce y el mismo T.S. Eliot.
Es una fuente grandiosa de referencias de grandes poetas, escritores y artistas de la más alta calidad y que han logrado hacer la diferencia y alcanzar una calidad inigualable desde la perspectiva de E.P. que con su estilo rebelde y dedicado al arte por encima de los intereses de los medios y editoriales presenta a muchos de quienes el considera se deben leer si se tiene la aspiración de ser un poco cultos.
Ezra Pound me ha dejado atónito con su amplio conocimiento, con su tenaz dedicación, había leído algunos poemas suyos pero no tenía idea de que fuera un crítico tan consagrado a su oficio.
El libro, consta de dos partes y 26 ensayos, que están organizados inicialmente en un orden cronológico que permiten mejor la comprensión del mismo, se inicia en la edad media y se llega a algunos ensayos de autores del siglo XX como Joyce y el mismo T.S. Eliot.
Es una fuente grandiosa de referencias de grandes poetas, escritores y artistas de la más alta calidad y que han logrado hacer la diferencia y alcanzar una calidad inigualable desde la perspectiva de E.P. que con su estilo rebelde y dedicado al arte por encima de los intereses de los medios y editoriales presenta a muchos de quienes el considera se deben leer si se tiene la aspiración de ser un poco cultos.
August 9, 2007
Lots of fun. The essay, "How To Read" is one of the very best literary essays ever written by an American poet. Way beyond the ABC's of reading, this essay simply rocks. Worth the whole book (though there is a lot of good stuff in this book). Try it.
June 2, 2008
I have only read the first section of this: "The Art of Poetry," but wish I had come upon it sooner. In particular, the two essays, "The Serious Artist," and "How to Read," are absolutely excellent.
May 14, 2025
I checked this book out of my university library in the hopes of reading some of Pound's reviews. The few I found in this collection had a decent tone of voice to them and a decent amount of indirectness contrary to that stifling directness of the autistic/mediocre/average review. He occasionally included anecdotes and other personal incidentals that made them feel nice and lively. But largely, Pound is an awful essayist. He writes with none of the proportion that Aristotle prescribed (which he didn't ascribe to, but my personality forces me to ascribe to). More importantly and more ironically he repeatedly and thoroughly failed to live up to his own standard of "maximum efficiency of expression." Perhaps he meant that only in terms of poetry, not prose, but I'd find such a compartmentalization extremely suspect given that in no other way does he compartmentalize successfully.
For Pound, everything operates off of vibes. If he feels like he can work a foreign language into the text, he will, and screw you if you want a translation. Even when he does give translations, I feel somewhat queasy, knowing his infamously bad translations from Chinese. I just feel at a standstill with him. All he really has is a force of personality, and all he reads for in literature is finding similarly forceful personalities. In one of the essays he decried the oversimplification of talking about an author as a whole, but I don't quite care; all his forcefulness pointed and pushed inevitably to his fascistic end. His infatuation with modernity feels naive at best and vicious at worst when you take into account the history that followed these essays, as well as the alarming trends we see today.
Pound plays fast and loose with everything: reading, writing, ideas, authors, languages; it's all just wind to him, and he's a vortex. He writes flippantly, demanding the "wholesale death and/or deportation of a great number of" people he disagrees with, and the whole project of modernism which he started has aged so poorly. It's like literature as a whole was temporarily dazzled by this cult leader who singlehandedly nearly lead the entire movement into suicide. I know and respect Eliot, who edited this collection, but it almost feels like he only worked on this because of the personal connection, not because of the merit of any of Pound's work on its own.
I've read some of the main pedagogical essays in here before, especially the awful "How to Read," and Pound's elitism is utterly at odds with more recent elitists like, for example, Harold Bloom. At least Bloom operates from a place of love for literature, rather than Pound's extremely narrow egotism and faux-cosmopolitanism. I've learned that I read to simply understand, Bloom reads to compare and cast judgement, and Pound reads in order to enlarge himself and his own ideas. He is a demagogue of the worst kind, one with political ambitions and a nasty streak. I personally don't see much worth preserving in his essays, given that by the time he sent them out for publication (correction, by the time he got around to self-publishing them), he was already another hundred miles down the road, and the first draft he left behind didn't receive any further attention from him. Thus the same with me. The only reason this should be read is for historical interest, although a summary would certainly do just as well.
For Pound, everything operates off of vibes. If he feels like he can work a foreign language into the text, he will, and screw you if you want a translation. Even when he does give translations, I feel somewhat queasy, knowing his infamously bad translations from Chinese. I just feel at a standstill with him. All he really has is a force of personality, and all he reads for in literature is finding similarly forceful personalities. In one of the essays he decried the oversimplification of talking about an author as a whole, but I don't quite care; all his forcefulness pointed and pushed inevitably to his fascistic end. His infatuation with modernity feels naive at best and vicious at worst when you take into account the history that followed these essays, as well as the alarming trends we see today.
Pound plays fast and loose with everything: reading, writing, ideas, authors, languages; it's all just wind to him, and he's a vortex. He writes flippantly, demanding the "wholesale death and/or deportation of a great number of" people he disagrees with, and the whole project of modernism which he started has aged so poorly. It's like literature as a whole was temporarily dazzled by this cult leader who singlehandedly nearly lead the entire movement into suicide. I know and respect Eliot, who edited this collection, but it almost feels like he only worked on this because of the personal connection, not because of the merit of any of Pound's work on its own.
I've read some of the main pedagogical essays in here before, especially the awful "How to Read," and Pound's elitism is utterly at odds with more recent elitists like, for example, Harold Bloom. At least Bloom operates from a place of love for literature, rather than Pound's extremely narrow egotism and faux-cosmopolitanism. I've learned that I read to simply understand, Bloom reads to compare and cast judgement, and Pound reads in order to enlarge himself and his own ideas. He is a demagogue of the worst kind, one with political ambitions and a nasty streak. I personally don't see much worth preserving in his essays, given that by the time he sent them out for publication (correction, by the time he got around to self-publishing them), he was already another hundred miles down the road, and the first draft he left behind didn't receive any further attention from him. Thus the same with me. The only reason this should be read is for historical interest, although a summary would certainly do just as well.
July 31, 2023
crackpot, equal parts enlightening (largely about pound himself) and entirely wrongheaded (about most other authors). eliot studiedly picked only from before pound descended into unreadable crackerbarrel phonetic american dialect
June 29, 2014
It is not necessary to read the whole book. In fact, I discourage reading much of his criticism (Parts 2 and 3) unless one reads the criticized first, with some exceptions. Even if you haven't read Dante, Homer (translated), or the troubadours, I recommend reading these sections. However, having yet to read Cavalcanti, Villon, Rimbaud, and a host of others that he addresses or references, I read selectively.
I recommend reading all of Part 1. Although his essay "A Retrospect" receives much attention, I found all his essays to be underline-worthy. "How To Read" is a concentrate of insight.
In Part 2, his writings on the troubadours, Arnaut Daniel in particular, Dante, and the Renaissance are excellent.
This book also serves as a resource to discover good writers from a variety of periods and locations. I compiled a list of authors that I want to find and read. Maybe then I can revisit this book when I am better read.
I recommend reading all of Part 1. Although his essay "A Retrospect" receives much attention, I found all his essays to be underline-worthy. "How To Read" is a concentrate of insight.
In Part 2, his writings on the troubadours, Arnaut Daniel in particular, Dante, and the Renaissance are excellent.
This book also serves as a resource to discover good writers from a variety of periods and locations. I compiled a list of authors that I want to find and read. Maybe then I can revisit this book when I am better read.
July 22, 2014
Okay, I didn't finish this bk, but as I've already returned it to the library, I should chalk it up here and say a few words. It's an exceptional book, but a lot of it pertaining to authors I either haven't read or whose work is too closely studied for my level of interest. There is one chapter, about the general practice or writing,however,that I loved for its sparkling prose and clever comments.
May 7, 2008
Pound's thoughts about the nature of reading, the beauty of life, the importance of scholars and artists to the well being of a society make me completely woozy.
Read
May 17, 2011fra le altre meraviglie di questo libro, un paragrafo intitolato
_traduttori dal greco: primi traduttori di omero_
_traduttori dal greco: primi traduttori di omero_
August 10, 2011
Some of the essays on writing are fantastic, but how Pound's 'book reviews' pass for literary criticism is beyond me.
March 24, 2017
I just learned what literary critique (plus a Brancusi essay) should be thru Pound, very personal and well-informed.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews