Jenna's Reviews > ABC of Reading

Here follows a list of the quotable parts, for the benefit of someone who wants to get the gist of this book without reading it:

"Literature is language charged with meaning. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. Language is the main means of human communication. If an animal's nervous system does not transmit sensations and stimuli, the animal atrophies. If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. Your legislator can't legislate for the public good, your commander can't command, your populace can't instruct its representatives, save by language."

"Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. There are three kinds of melopoeia: verse made to sing; to chant or intone; and to speak. The older one gets the more one believes in the first."

"Only a long-eared, furry-eared epoch would have thought of printing [lyrics:] apart from their tunes as has been done in our time."

"The sonnet is the DEVIL,...first because of its having all its lines the same length, which was itself a result of divorce from song..." For good measure, Pound goes on to quote a rather vehement W.S.Landor poem that denounces sonnetry in English: "Why should we/Who draw deep seines along the sea,/Cut them in pieces to beset/The shallows with a cabbage-net?"

"Gower was the perfect type of English secondary writer, condemned for all time by Henri Davray with his 'Ils cherchent des sentiments pour les accommoder a leur vocabulaire.' (They hunt for sentiments to fit into their vocabulary.)"