Scientific Methods in Literary Criticism
Ezra Pound's Scientific Approach to Literature
Nevertheless, the method I had proposed was simple; it is perhaps the only one that can give a man an orderly arrangement of his perception in the matter of letters. In opposition to it, there are the forces of superstition, of hang-over. People regard literature as something vastly more flabby, floating, complicated, and indefinite than, let us say, mathematics. Its subject matter, the human consciousness, is more complicated than are number and space. It is not, however, more complicated than biology, and no one ever supposed that it was. We apply a loose-leaf system to bookkeeping so as to have the live items separated from the dead ones.
In the study of physics, we begin with simple mechanisms:...