Into what he variously described as 'gists', maxims, axioms and aphorisms, Pound encapsulated the essence of his critical thought or intuition, commonsense or wisdom in a memorably epigrammatic way. The Dantesque clarity, concision and concreteness he aspired to-and often succeeded in achieving- in his poetry, he also succeeds in achieving in his pithy comments and conclusions which are comparable with the best of their kind by Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Eliot and Leavis. Unbounded confidence in him-self, in his judgement and perception, and in his 'high and final EZthority', enabled him to pinpoint, with extraordinary incisiveness and simplicity, the various facets of the art of poetry - especially of modem poetry - as well as of the practice and profession of literary criticism. These dicta bring out, no less than does his most 'personal' poetry, the way Pound's mind and intelligence, and his critical perception and intuition work, enabling him to see 'fitfully and by starts' what other critics have to toil, dissect and analyse long to explore.
Apart from those we have already come across in the course of this book. here are some salient examples of the Poundian dicta on poetry, criticism, culture, art, religion:
1. Without constant experiment literature dies.
2. There is gongorism in critical writings as well as in bad poetry.
3. Parody is the best criticism - it sifts the durable from the apparent.
4. Lope de Vega is not a man, he is a literature.
5. Aristotle was so good at his job that he anchored human thought for 2000 years.
6. You could call Orage a damn fool and respect him.
7. Virgil is a second-rate, Tennysonianized version of Homer.
8. No one will ever gauge or measure English poetry until they knew how much of it, how full a gamut of its qualities, is already THERE ON THE PAGE OF CHAUCER.
9. Try to find a poem of Byron or Poe without seven serious defects.
10. It is hard to drop an enthusiasm.
11. Glory is a damned inedible substance.
12. Dogma is bluff based on ignorance.
13. Belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions.
14. The essence of religion is the present tense.
15. The syllogism, time and again, loses grip on reality.
16. By genius I mean an inevitable swiftness and right-mindedness in a given field.
17. There is no democracy in the arts.
18. [To his mother] No periodical is ever much good. I hope you don't think I read the periodicals I appear in.
19. The quintessence of style is that it should be swift and mordant.
20. Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism.
21. No one knows enough, soon enough.
22. A writer dies when he ceases to have, and exercise, omnivorous curiosity.
23. The trained never think.
24. It is very often easy to do for another what one couldn't possibly do for one's self.
25. The UNprintable part of my writing is what deals with ANYthing of importance.
26. One's preparation for a real job is possibly never what one does when one thinks one is preparing.
27. Tenny rate, stagnation comes from inside; and not from the circumst.
28. Ownership is often a damned nuisance, and anchor.
29. Xtianity is a poor substitute for truth.
30. One definition of beauty: aptness to purpose.
31. He [Christ] is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted upon him. As well blame me for all the bunk in vers libre.
32. Je revere plutot le bon sens que l'originalite.
33. Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives.
34. NO GOOD WORK EVER KNOCKED OUT ANY 0THER GOOD WORK.
35. Truth is not untrue'd by reason of our failing to fix it on paper.
36. The miracle of Homer is that great poesie is everywhere latent and that literary finish is up to Henry James.
37. A narrative is all right so long as the narrator sticks to words as simple as dog, horse, and sunset.
38. Music is excellent discipline for the writer of the prose.
39. Knowledge is to know man. Mr Alexander Pope rubs it a bit too smooth. If you translate him, the proper study for man is anthropology, you get nearer the source of error.
40. Only in basicly pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance.
41. A REAL book is one whose words grow ever more luminous as one's experience increases or as one is led or edged over into considering them with greater attention.
42. The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is the sun, air and the sea and the rain and the lake bathing. The cult of ugliness, Villon, Baudelaire, Corbiere, Beardsley are diagnosis. Flaubert is diagnosis. Satire is surgery, insertions, amputations.
43. 'Good writing' is perfect control.
44. All criticism should be professedly personal criticism.
45. Poetry, the lordliest of arts.
46. The function of criticism is to efface itself when it has established its dissociations. Let it stand that from 1912 onward for a decade and more I was instrumental in forcing into print, and secondarily in commenting on, certain work now recognized as valid by all competent readers.
47. The sonnet was not a great poetic invention. The sonnet occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His 'genius' consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter.
48. For most translation one would merely say, take it away and start again.
49. All criticism is an attempt to define the classic.
50. A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented.
51. When a civilization is vivid it preserves and fosters all sorts of artists - painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, architects.
When a civilization is dull and anemic it preserves a rabble of priests, sterile instructors, and repeaters of things second-hand.
52. Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliche and another.
53. An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
54. Civilisation is individual.
55. It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
56. The infinite gulf between what you read and enjoy and what you set up as a model.
57. Italian concept of poetry: something oppressive and to be revered.
58. The more a man goes over a real writer the more he knows that no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.
59. The Bible should be read after the reader is literate.
60. The basis of a state is its economic justice.
From Ezra Pound as Critic G. Singh
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