Ezra Pound's Revolutionary Approach to Literary Criticism

Ezra Pound: The Innovator of Modernist Criticism

Ezra Pound was the first innovator, and everything he did was new and directed to supersede the past. He devised the advancement of Modernism. His writings are intransferable and colloquial; they are aggressive and personal. Sometimes, apart from critical writings, we can see his journalistic prose.

The Conception and Function of Criticism

Conception of Criticism: He considered criticism an unimportant task that was secondary, and he was opposed to Matthew Arnold. The criticism must fulfill two conditions:

• The critic should be an artist.
• It should be criticism that compels people to write better; it should be a didactic criticism.

This criticism for him has two functions: Before the creation of the work, it had to help the writers and teach poets to write well; after the creation, it had to discriminate between good and bad poetry. The critic who performs this must be a teacher or an anthologist. He never produced "touchstones" that fell on subjectivity; he was direct and never gave rules to discriminate other works as descriptive critics would do. Good poetry is what you like and seems good to you.

Opposition to Academic and Vicious Criticism

He is against academic criticism because academic critics are not artists, and their work is derivative because you derive your thoughts from someone else's thoughts and you do not innovate anything.

This could be called "Vicious criticism." He is very aggressive and offensive. To him, academic critics are "rubbish" because they don't have their own opinions. Your criticism should be put into your own words.

A Non-Historical and Universal Approach to Literature

Non-historical, non-national approach to literature: Pound was indifferent to a few things: the history of criticism and the biographical approaches to an author's work. His method of analysis was completely non-historical. For him, poetry is always the same and the changes are superficial. These changes include:

• Themes and topics
• Style and language

These things change, so for him, this was not the essence of poetry. For him, poetry is something ethereal; it is a beautiful sentence that means nothing. We need a literary critic who doesn't take into account the time in which things are written. An ancient poet is not different from a modern poet, so the ages should be considered equal.

He thought that if you consider poetry in relation to its era, you will be producing bad literary criticism. Literature does not organize itself by temporal criteria; literature should not be connected to time or to places—it should be independent. For him, literature includes great, powerful works regardless of time. There are important works in a lot of languages, so the best solution for understanding them was translation.