Commentaries on Herder's Philosophical Writings (trans. Michael N. Forster)

Ezra Pound writes good stuff, and his pamphlet "How to Read" is a solid introduction on how to interpret literature. But first, it starts off with a critique on how Literature studies was being conducted: how they focused too much on specific categories, rather than the development of literature in general. The point being that the study of literature musn't be divided along national, racial, or religious categories— it must be divided along developments in literature itself.

Literature must be studied like a science, despite the preconception of the subject as something "flabby" compared to the calculating logic of hard sciences such as math. However, there are definite traces of development, and definite moments of discoveries in writing; and could therefore be studied in terms of its development. In fact, he contests that literature as a field of study is less complex than biology. Just like how a student of physics begins by studying simple systems such as pulleys and levers, studying literature should not begin with categories, but on essential discoveries made about literature itself:

"In the study of physics we begin with simple mechanisms, wedge, lever, and fulcrum, pulley and inclined plane, all of them still as useful as when they were first invented. We proceed by a study of discoveries. We are not asked to memorize a list of the parts of a side/wheeler engine. And we could, presumably, apply to the study of literature a little of the common sense that we currently apply to physics or to biology. In poetry there are simple procedures, and there are known discoveries, clearly marked. As I have said invarious places in my unorganized and fragmentary volumes: in each age one or two men of genius find something, and express it. It may be in only a line or in two lines, or in some quality of a cadence; and thereafter two dozen, or two hundred, or two or more thousand followers repeat and dilute and modify."

"And if the instructor would select his specimens from works that contain these discoveries and solely on the basis of discovery—which may lie in the dimension of depth, not merely of some novelty on the surface—he would aid his student far more than by presenting his authors at random..."

Dividing the discoveries in literature into categories (e.g, American and Episcopalian literature into one category, German and Methodist into another) betrays the dialectical nature of literature — that it builds up on other works. Ezra detests the direction of this development, since it shifts the focus away from literature and into the inane.

The function of literature is that it eases the mind of strain and incites it towards impulse. For the public, the function of literature isn't to be a means of coercing, persuasion, bullying, or suppression, but with clarification of thoughts and opinions themselves:

"It has to do with the clarity and vigour of “ any and every ” thought and opinion. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself."

"...the individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor, and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised literati. When their work goes rotten— by that I do not mean when they express indecorous thoughts—but when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e., becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot."

The greatness of a literary work is proportional to its exactness; to how true it is to human consciousness and our nature; to its exactness in formulating desire:

"One “ moves ” the reader only by clarity. In depicting the motions of the “ human heart ” the durability of the writing depends on the exactitude. It is the thing that is true and stays true that keeps fresh for the new reader."

This is because the esssence of literature is the communication of thoughts by using language. For literature to be good, it must fulfill its essence. To efficiently commmunicate thought with language. As Ezra puts it in Part II;

Pound examines six kinds of people that involve themselves in this literary charging:

1. The inventors, discoverers of a particular process or of more than one mode and process. Sometimes these people are known, or discoverable; for example, we know, with reasonable certitude, that Arnaut Daniel introduced certain methods of rhyming, and we know that certain finesnesses of perception appeared first in such a troubadour or in G. Cavalcanti. We do not know, and are not likely to know, anything definite about the pre-cursors of Homer.

2. The masters. This is a very small class, and there are very few real ones. The term is properly applied to inventors who, apart from their own inventions, are able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions. They either start with a core of their own and accumulate adjuncts, or they digest a vast mass of subject-matter, apply a number of known modes of expression, and succeed in pervading the whole with some special quality or some special character of their own, and bring the whole to a state of homogeneous fulness.

3. The diluters, those who follow either the inventors or the masters, and who produce something of lower intensity, some flabbier variant.

4. The people that more or less do good work in the more or less good style of the period. These people produces the great bulk of writing. They add "some slight personal flavour, some minor variant of a mode," without affecting the main course of literature.

5. Belles Lettres (French, "Beautiful Writing"). Not exactly “great masters,” who can hardly be said to have originated a form, but who have nevertheless wrote some beautiful works. Pound places Longus, Prevost and Benjamin Constant in this category.

6. Starters of crazes. Writers whose style of writing "flows over writing for a few centuries or a few decades, and then subsides, leaving things as they were.

By studying literature as the development of certain modes and processes in writing, we see that most of literature is merely downstream from the works of inventors and masters. With this in mind, Pound points out that someone only needs to know the facts about the first two categories in order to judge the place of any unfamiliar book upon the first reading. Reading works from the other categories will not greatly change opinion about those in the first two.

However, this knowledge is unattainable without the knowledge of various languages. If one doesn't have the time to learn different langauges, they can at least be told what the discoveries were. To be a good critic, one has to look for them directly.

These analysis though merely touch on developments, its outer classifications which relates it to other literary works. When examining literature for what it is—the charging of meaning into language—, we find that language in literature is charged in various manners. To show the various manners and the necessity of knowing the language, Pound uses poetry as an example to list three "kinds of poetry":

Melopœia, poetry in which words are charged, over and above their meaning, with musical property (rhyme, melody, etc.), a property that tends towards that meaning.

Phanopœia, poetry which casts images upon visual imagination

Logopœia, poetry which exercises wordplay, that is to say, it uses words not only for their direct meaning, but takes the context we expect them to be in, its usual concomitants, and subverts them in ironical play; a satire.

Of these three types, the melopœia can be appreciated by a foreigner that does not know the language, even when the meaning of the poem is lost. It is practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save by divine accident, and for half a line at a time.

Phanopœia can, on the other hand, be translated almost, or wholly, intact. When it's good enough, it's almost impossible for a translator to destroy its meaning, save by crass handling.

Logopœia does not translate; however the attitude it expresses, its implicit contextual meaning, can be paraphrased in a blunt, unpoetic manner.

The language of prose, in contrast to poetry, is the literal mode of literature. As Pound describes it:

"Prose permits greater factual presentation, explicitness, but a much greater amount of language is needed."

In the past, poetry held pre-eminence in literature, but Pound remarks that in the last century or century and a half during 1931, prose has risen to challenge poetry's dominance. Certain prose works in the 19th century had possibly surpassed individual poems of that period; but this merely indicates that the author wrote more. Because prose must stay literal, it can only surpass the charge in a poem by accumulation of data, heaping information; all of which is presented in a factual manner. Pound shows this in how Flaubert's prose matches Villon's poetry:

"By using several hundred pages of prose, Flaubert, by force of architectonics, manages to attain an intensity comparable to that in Villon’s Heaulmiere, or his prayer for his mother ("Donne A Ma Povre Mere")."

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