On Reading Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading

Well! The Persona (see what I did there, Pound groupies?) of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading glories in its snarky, grumpy old man status and no mistake!

“[Yeats] is very sensitive to a limited gamut of rhythms.”

“From an examination of Walt made thirty years ago, the present writer carried away the impression that there are thirty well written pages of Whitman: he is now unable to find them.”

It’s an opinionated, bloody-minded and prejudiced book which turns literary snobbery into an art form. it requires the reader to know Greek, Latin, Italian, French (and Medieval Provençal French at that!) and German as an given. It is also all too easy to fall into imitating – this is a very artfully dishevelled lecture and I keep inadvertently stumbling into echoes of Pound’s manner.

But I’ve read The ABC primarily as an ABC of reading Pound and as an essential preliminary to re-reading the Cantos in particular. It’s a treatise on his methodology as a reader and it is as a reader and a musician that he sets forth as a poet.

Additionally, he’s convinced me – help! – that I need to read Chaucer properly after a gap of more than thirty years, along with Jane Austen and Browning. I was always bored by Pope and I think Pound was too. I have no intention of following up on his baffling enthusiasm for Landor, however. The lengthy chunks he provides as evidence of Landor’s supposed relevance are quite enough to put me off.

Which is as it should be. If nothing else, one consistent message in this eccentric little book is “Make up your own mind.”