Saturday 30 January 2010

Do's and Don'ts from Ezra Pound

- Poetry should be written at least as well as prose.

- Language is an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.

- Go in fear of abstraction

- Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

- Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace'. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

- A narrative is all right as long as the narrator sticks to words as simple as dog, horse, sunset.

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