"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand"
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Reading, for Pound, isn’t self-improvement or tasteful leisure. It’s a voltage test. “Read for power” treats literature as a tool that charges the reader’s capacities: perception, judgment, appetite for precision. The jab is aimed at passive consumption - the dutiful reader collecting “culture” like souvenirs. Pound insists on a different posture: not reverent, not relaxed, but combative and awake.
The phrasing performs the demand. “Man reading should be man intensely alive” is blunt to the point of provocation, a line with the hard edges of manifesto. He’s arguing against the sleepy Victorian idea of books as moral furniture. In Pound’s modernist world, the page is an engine: it should sharpen attention, reorganize time, make you feel the stakes of language. The subtext is a politics of energy. A culture that reads weakly, he implies, thinks weakly; it becomes easy prey for cliché, propaganda, and secondhand feeling.
Then comes the image that makes the whole thing stick: “a ball of light in one’s hand.” That metaphor collapses two roles of art at once - illumination and heat. A “proper” book doesn’t just explain; it radiates, it burns, it changes what the reader can see after the fact. Pound’s larger project (imagism, the modernist break, the cult of the “new”) was obsessed with stripping language down until it carried maximum charge. This line is his aesthetic in miniature: fewer words, more wattage, and a reader who’s not comforted but activated.
The phrasing performs the demand. “Man reading should be man intensely alive” is blunt to the point of provocation, a line with the hard edges of manifesto. He’s arguing against the sleepy Victorian idea of books as moral furniture. In Pound’s modernist world, the page is an engine: it should sharpen attention, reorganize time, make you feel the stakes of language. The subtext is a politics of energy. A culture that reads weakly, he implies, thinks weakly; it becomes easy prey for cliché, propaganda, and secondhand feeling.
Then comes the image that makes the whole thing stick: “a ball of light in one’s hand.” That metaphor collapses two roles of art at once - illumination and heat. A “proper” book doesn’t just explain; it radiates, it burns, it changes what the reader can see after the fact. Pound’s larger project (imagism, the modernist break, the cult of the “new”) was obsessed with stripping language down until it carried maximum charge. This line is his aesthetic in miniature: fewer words, more wattage, and a reader who’s not comforted but activated.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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