ABC of Reading [Paperback]

Ezra Pound (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 1960

Ezra Pound’s classic book about the meaning of literature.

This important work, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of Pound’s aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become increasingly sensitive to the beauty and inspiration of the world’s best literature. With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. ABC of Reading displays Pound’s great ability to open new avenues in literature for our time.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Full of original and suggestive ideas on the meaning and operation of the poetic art. The comments ring with Pound’s early wit and vigor. (The New Yorker )

Incredibly alive and intelligent and first-rate. (The New York Times ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin’s first letter to Pound, he wrote: “Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of ‘noble caring’ for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US.” Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (January 17, 1960)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811201511
• ISBN-13: 978-0811201513
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maddeningly Brilliant, September 7, 2005

By 

Barnaby Thieme (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ABC of Reading (Paperback)

A typical sentence: "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."

You may use this quote as a meter for predicting your enjoyment of the book. If you find it amusing and arguable, Pound's ABC of Reading will delight you with its erudite gems. If you are repulsed by the presumption, then give the book a wide berth.

Pound sets a standard for basic literacy that few literature scholars can hope to achieve (including mastery of several languages as a pre-requisite to study). Nonetheless, the book is a treasure trove of brilliant and piquant observations, and is itself an exemplar of the crystaline prose Pound extolled. You would be hard-pressed to find an ostentatious or superflous word in the book's entire 200 briskly-moving pages.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book with a pen in your hand, January 21, 2005

By 

Michael P Mccullough "moik" (Klamath Falls, Oregon, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ABC of Reading (Paperback)

Read this book with a pen in your hand because you are going to want to underline the dozens of amazing sentences and little paragraphs, as well as scribble complaints and disparaging comments next to the rash and just plain faulty ones.

This book will astonish and anger a thoughtful reader. It is not a coherent essay that moves logically from point to point - it is a jarring, manic kaleidoscope.

Since I am a typical American and only understand one language (English, modern) some of this volume was lost to me - but this book is well worth the time you will spend reading it. Highly recommended for all striving writers and people who would like to read more earnestly.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rantings of Correctness, June 26, 2001

By 

Lucas Klein (Beijing) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ABC of Reading (Paperback)

Pound was an angry, noisy man whose honesty--and the extent to which the volcano of his personality burns through his prose--is convincing and, when it comes to literature, correct. I can think of no one I'd rather have read anything I've written & say: damn good.

He's dead & that's not going to happen. But we can still get the brash truth about literature, in easy-to-remember pithy comments such as "Literature is news that STAYS news" or comparisons of writing to making a table (don't matter which leg you start with so long as it stands upright when you're done) or to writing a check (the writing of a bad check is a criminal act). He also tells us why, say, Milton was a lousy poet & Homer a great one.

The all-embracing, subjective, if-someone-likes-it-then-it's-good parts of us will reel against some of Pound's fascistic judgements, but the arbiter of taste in each of us, the madman or woman who fumes at how ad. copy is deadening our linguistic nerves, will stand proud at owning, reading, & quoting--often--The ABC of Reading.