Abstract

Gastronomy of Letters

This article focuses on the book "ABC of Reading," by Ezra Pound. Pound repeatedly assures that all previous books on the appreciation of literature have been swindles, and he begins with a bow to science, a word which usually does the same work among the sophisticated that Old Glory performs among the naive. It is "scientific" to look at specimens of poetry like the man in the laboratory examining smears on a slide; and in the name of science Pound proposes to do just this. Yet having begun so promisingly, he slips into a subterfuge. He completely passes over the fact that if one locks at the smear on a slide without the assistance of a vast critical vocabulary, one will see mighty little. Pound seems to feel that the naked exposure to the specimens is in itself "scientific." He aggressively and repeatedly asserts that people who ask to be told the rules of good workmanship are trying to get something for nothing.