Status Updates From Literary Essays of Ezra Pound

THE TEACHER’S MISSION

I
Artists are the antennae of the race.’ If this statement is incomprehensible and if its corollaries need any explanation, let me put it that a nation’s writers are the voltometers and steam-gauges of that nation’s intellectual life.

On closer analysis I find that I mean something like ‘maximum efficiency of expression’; I mean that the writer has expressed something interesting in such a way that one cannot re-say it more effectively. I also mean something associated with discovery. The artist must have discovered something—either of life itself or of the means of expression.