How Ezra Pound might approach Literature
Literature. A sieve. That’s what it is now, for most. A polite trickle of sentimental bilge, obscuring the hard granite of true *cosa mentale*. Make it New! Yes, and they’ve made it… *soft*. Diluted. Like watered wine for tepid palates.
The ‘thing’ itself, the naked image – *per esempio*, a crab scuttling sideways on a barnacled pier, or Odysseus bound to the mast, hearing the song – this is what the poet *must* present. Not a pale echo, not a smoothed-over sentiment. The lump of the thing itself, sharp, vital.
But what do we have? Gobs of… confessional drivel. The poet as a weeping infant, or worse, a disgruntled clerk. The great Tradition, the lineage from Homer, from Dante, from Villon – reduced to a dusty footnote in a college syllabus. Where is the *craft*? The chisel work? The precise alloy of sound and sense?
Usura, you see. It’s not just the banker’s sin. It’s the rot that eats at the soul of a culture, a slow poisoning that enfeebles the mind and corrupts the *anima*. It makes men value cheap imitation over true artistry, the fleeting fashion over the eternal form. It makes them mistake mere *reporting* for revelation.
The antennae of the race – what are they picking up now? Static. Noise. The ceaseless drone of mediocrity. The poet must be the surgeon, not the mortician. To excise the dead flesh, to clear the pathways, to ensure the vital currents flow. The rest is just… rubbish. Burning rubbish. And the scent of it is everywhere.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Ezra Pound’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.