ABC of Reading Quotes

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“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, ABC of Reading

“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“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, ABC of Reading

“No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention — and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives.

There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.

He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. ”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“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.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“ANY general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“La gran literatura no es más que el lenguaje cargado de sentido hasta el grado máximo que sea posible.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“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, ABC of Reading

“More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence. Technical solidity is not attained without at least some persistence. The chief cause of false writing is economic. Many writers need or want money. These writers could be cured by an application of banknotes. The next cause is the desire men have to tell what they don't know, or to pass off an emptiness for a fullness. They are discontented with what they have to say and want to make a pint of comprehension fill up a gallon of verbiage. An author having a very small amount of true contents can make it the basis of formal and durable mastery, provided he neither inflates nor falsifies [...] The plenum of letters is not bounded by primaeval exclusivity functioning against any kind of human being or talent, but only against false coiners, men who will not dip their metal in the acid of known or accessible fact.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Pisanello painted horses so that one remembers the painting, and the Duke of Milan sent him to Bologna to BUY horses. Why a similar kind of 'horse sense' can't be applied in the study of literature is, and has always been, beyond my comprehension. Pisanello had to LOOK at the horses. You would think that anyone wanting to know about poetry would do one of two things or both. I.E. LOOK AT it or listen to it. He might even think about it? And if he wanted advice he would go to someone who KNEW something about it.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“In general we may say that the deliquescence of instruction in any art proceeds in this manner. A master invents a gadget, or procedure to perform a particular function, or a limited set of functions. Pupils adopt the gadget. Most of them use it less skilfully than the master. The next genius may improve it, or he may cast it aside for something more suited to his own aims. Then comes the paste-headed pedagogue or theorist and proclaims the gadget a law, or rule. Then a bureaucracy is endowed, and the pin-headed secretariat attacks every new genius and every form of inventiveness for not obeying the law, and for perceiving something the secretariat does not. The great savants ignore, quite often, the idiocies of the ruck of the teaching profession. [...] the ignorant of one generation set out to make laws, and gullible children next try to obey them.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“It is very difficult to make people understand the impersonal indignation that a decay of writing can cause men who understand what it implies, and the end whereto it leads. It is almost impossible to express any degree of such indignation without being called 'embittered', or something of that sort.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Rome rose with the idiom of Caesar, Ovid, and Tacitus, she declined in a welter of rhetoric, the diplomat's language to conceal thought', and so forth. [...] A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in a very few words. The economic problem of the teacher (of violin or of language or of anything else) is how to string it out so as to be paid for more lessons.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Incompetence will show in the use of too many words. The reader's first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don't NEED schools and colleges to keep 'em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every 80 often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, 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, ABC of Reading

“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability AS WRITERS. This is their main use. All other uses are relative, and temporary, and can be estimated only in relation to the views of a particular estimator.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading