ABC of Reading

Today we’ll continue our series of books about literature, following Mortimer Adler’s advice about syntopical reading. This time, though, instead of a Classical author, will be someone of almost our own time, Ezra Pound.

In some ways, it’s easier to digest Pound’s ABC of Reading than the works of our friends Longinus and Demetrius. For one thing, we know exactly who he was and when his book was first published (1934). As an American, he’s able to speak to us (fellow Americans, and for the most part other Westerners) with few cultural boundaries. At some level, less has changed over the last century than one might expect from a surface-level analysis, as many of our current problems had their origins in Pound’s day.

ABC does present some difficulties, though. Pound intends to write a textbook and so does keep his idiosyncrasies and hot takes to a minimum, but they’re certainly still present and there’s no mistaking his style. It’s also not as tightly organised as what our Greek friends gave us. For example, though there is a logical progression to the book, he often brings up a topic, says a few words about it, then addresses it again later, recapitulating a point or adding to it. Repetition is didactically useful, but it’s difficult to refer back to the book because everything he has to say on a given topic is rarely all in one place. He certainly puts the reader’s outlining and note-taking skills to the test.

There are a lot of great insights throughout the book, which I may compile and discuss in a future article. For now, I’ll focus on his central point about studying literature:

Look at it.

Really, look at it. As he says:

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?

In fact, even in the final section of the book, the “treatise on metre,” one would expect him to spend some time defining the different metres commonly used in English, how poets have used them historically, variations on each, and so on. Instead, he does very little of that, but he urges the poet to “LISTEN to the sound it makes” when writing.

At the beginning of the book, he makes an illustrative comparison to biology:

The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another.

The comparison of various literary specimens is what much of the book consists of. Pound presents the student with a number of examples of notable writing, with relatively minimal comment, and leaves much of the work to the student. It is, I suppose, a similar approach to Confucius’, who said, “I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson.”

This isn’t to say he immediately throws students into the deep end. Again, he does offer some commentary to help out, and spends a lot of time discussing some general concepts before getting to the specimens. He also offers several exercises that serve as a warm-up, to encourage students to begin thinking about literature in a serious way. For example, in one exercise, he wants the student to think about who his favourite writers are, and really consider why he likes them. I’ve actually offered similar advice in the past to people who’ve asked me about how to go about reviewing books (and other media, for that matter). Really sit down and think about what, exactly, it is you like or dislike about what you read and watch.

He also encourages careful observation in general. In another exercise, he instructs students to write an exact description of some object or (“If it can be done without a breach of the peace”) another student. This idea was taken from an anecdote he shares about Flaubert teaching De Maupassant how to write, by asking him write a description of, say, a concierge they had seen during a walk with enough specificity that he could not be confused for some other concierge.

Observe carefully, and be precise in your language.

I won’t go into the specimens in detail here; the entire point, after all, is that you read and examine them for yourself. Again, Pound doesn’t leave you entirely on your own (though he does say he considered presenting them with no comment, but decided this would be too radical for a textbook). For each one, he’ll say a few words about what he’s illustrating, and the whole course is meant to serve as a brief overview of the development of poetry in English.

The specimens also work as a reading list, and as one would expect from such a textbook, Pound does give a one-page list of recommended authors, arranged chronologically, that could serve as a canon of poets. Interestingly, though he’s often critical of many authors, he has no problem with others reading them. For example, he says that “It is my firm opinion that there are many defects in Greek drama.” However:

I should never try to stop a man’s reading Aeschylus or Sophocles. There is nothing in this book that ought in any way to curtail a man’s reading or to prevent his reading anything he enjoys.

Elsewhere in the book, Pound refers to Rodolfo Agricola, who said that one writes “to teach, to move, or to delight.” All three of these purposes are important and have their place.

There are a couple more points I’d like to touch on briefly before concluding. These could, perhaps, go in a future post following up on the many insights Pound offers the reader, but these are important enough that I think they belong here in the main review.

First, Pound’s most consistent test of good writing is efficiency. As he puts it:

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.

Finally, there’s the importance to both readers and writers to having a life outside of books:

Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life. Or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. The prejudice against books has grown from observing the stupidity of men who have merely read books.

I’ve seen a similar point made in the context of popular culture to explain why popular media is not, in general, as good as it was some decades ago. Pioneers of animation, whether, say, Walt Disney in the United States or someone like Tezuka Osamu in Japan, grew up living a real life and taking in influences that were, of course, unrelated to animation. Today, however, animators grow up with and take all of their references from animation, and so their work is much more insular and growing stale. The same argument is sometimes made about video games.

For literature, I think we can see that, in general, the most interesting works have been written by men like Dante or Chaucer, who had rich, interesting lives outside of their books. Navel-gazing or extremely self-referential authors and genres may be interesting to a niche audience, but have much narrower appeal.

Again, we may return to Pound’s ABC of Reading later. This is the third time I’ve read this book, and I’ve loved it every time. I wouldn’t say it’s for absolutely everyone; someone with a more casual interest in literature may, for instance, prefer Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, for example. As an introductory textbook for a serious student, though, it’s excellent.