Non-fiction: ABC of Reading

Overview
Ezra Pound presents a compact, forceful primer on reading poetry and judging literary technique. His writing aims to sharpen the reader's ear and eye so that formal choices, diction, rhythm, imagery, become palpable rather than decorative. The tone is practical and polemical: assertions are brisk, examples pointed, and the goal is to convert passive consumption into an active, technical appreciation.
Pound treats reading as a craft skill. He insists that the quality of a poem turns on measurable operations of language, and he presses readers to recognize and evaluate those operations rather than rely on vague impressions or moralizing judgments.

Principles of Technique
Pound isolates the elements that make language do work in poetry. He divides poetic effect into interlocking functions: the musical shaping of sound, the projection of images, and the semantic play of words. Each function can be examined and trained; mastery of one does not excuse weakness in another. Attention to stress, cadence, consonantal color and silence are as important as the ability to conjure a clean, precise image.
Diction is the pivotal concern. Pound demands exactness: words must carry weight and specificity, not drift into abstraction or sentimentality. He attaches great importance to the economy of language and to the compression that allows an image or phrase to do more than a dictionary definition would suggest.

How to Read
Close, repeated reading is central to Pound's method. Sound should be tested aloud; rhythm is perceived in the speaking voice as much as it is observed on the page. Lineation, pauses, enjambment and the placement of stresses reveal the poem's shaping; examining them dispels illusion and exposes technique. He encourages readers to strip away paraphrase and to dwell on the actual words, their order and their resonances.
Comparative reading underpins his pedagogy. Translation, etymology and attention to other languages train the reader to feel shades of meaning and to recognize technique imported from earlier traditions. Pound expects active comparison with strong models, believing that the mind learns technical subtleties by repeated exposure to excellence.

Models and Sources
Ancient and non-Western literatures figure prominently as exemplars. Classical poets, medieval masters and poets from other linguistic traditions provide tests of technique: clarity of image, economy, and rhythmic integrity. Pound's admiration for certain translations and for concise, image-driven poetry reflects his larger modernist commitments and his insistence on cross-cultural learning as corrective to flabby modern taste.
The historical sweep is practical rather than encyclopedic: examples are marshaled when they illuminate a point about craft. The effect is to create a compact curriculum of models rather than a survey of aesthetic theory.

Legacy and Assessment
The primer's strength lies in its insistence that reading is a technical act that can be refined through disciplined practice. Its aphoristic clarity helped shape modernist critical habits and trained generations of readers and poets to privilege precision, rhythm, and imagistic economy. The tone can be brusque, and some positions are polemical or narrow, yet the central insistence on attentive, skill-aware reading remains influential.
As a guide for anyone determined to understand how poems do their work, the approach is energizing: it replaces passive admiration with method, and replaces ornamental praise with criteria by which technique can be observed, tested and understood.