Ezra Pound's "A Retrospect", p. 1505

I decided to comment on Ezra Pound’s critical piece, “A Retrospect.” He strikes me as a very intelligent individual. This piece actually reminds me of George Orwell’s piece, “Politics and Education.” I am inclined to think that Pound may have had some influence on Orwell.

I enjoyed the way he criticizes "vers libre.” I especially enjoyed the part where he says, “Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound.” I could not help but laugh when I read this. There have been times when I have read poetry and I cannot make out what the author is trying to say. As I recall, I had a teacher in grade school that would recite some poems that did not make any sense, but because they rhymed or sounded good, she would read them to us. We never really liked the poems she read, but we always asked her to recite them so that we could kill time.

One of the passages I found most striking is when he says, “Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.” Usually all writers are influenced by other writers. Pound suggests that whether they are past or present writers, one should acknowledge their talent and give credit where credit is due. However, you may pass a piece off as your own as long as you don’t sound exactly like the artist you are influenced by.

I find it interesting that Pound criticizes the principles of Imagism, a method he once used to write poetry. I wonder what may have happened to turn him against Imagism. Perhaps his work did not do so well. It could also have been that he learned more through experience and he and the other two poets who made the three suggestions (“demanding direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical phrase”) were trying to find a rebirth for old poetry. Perhaps, it was frustrating to them that, because of the superfluity of Imagism, poetry was becoming so abstract that it was not as enjoyable.

Although Pound speaks of poetry, this piece nevertheless made me reflect on my writing and how I may be using superfluous words. I know I sure don’t like it when I have to read something so difficult that I need a dictionary to make sense of it! So, from now on, I will try to check my writing to make sure that every word counts.