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Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Evaluation: Pound’s Typology
Given various discussions about the need for evaluative criticism, I thought I’d post a little typology that Ezra Pound set out in The A B C of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960, pp. 39-40):
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:
1 Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
2 The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
3 The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
4 Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. ...
5 Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
6 The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees.’ He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library ... but he will never be able to sort out what he knows or to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.
I’ve never really thought these categories through, though I suspect that they probably need some revision. It’s not clear to me, for example, just what the rank ordering means and whether or not such a simple ordering is appropriate. Perhaps we only need a partial ordering.
Were I to think this through, it would be with an eye to cultural process: Do these different classes of writer—or, by generalization, any expressive creator—play distinctly different roles in the creating and dissemination of literature? If so, what are those roles?
Comments
There’s a certain logic in the first three. Inventing something, synthesizing the inventions of others in a masterful way, and diluting this mastery through repetition. It’s not clear whether Pound values invention more than mastery, though the logic of the list is hierarchical (from top to bottom).
It’s not clear why #4 is not just a dilution of the tradition, like #3? Still, it’s useful concept to see a writer as lucky enough to come along when a particular tradition is healthy. I can think of some examples.
#5 is not particularly clear to me. And the “starter of crazes” just might be an “inventor,” seen from another angle.
It might help clarify the categories to consider which writers fit which. Many will fit more than category. Joyce, for instance, could be a #1 or #2, depending on which book you consider. Hell, he’s also a bit of a #6.
Jonathan, I think you’re quite onto something. 4 & 5 should collapse into 3, while the difference between 2 & 6 gets into de gustibus territory. Reminds me of a professor who told us we didn’t need to read Ulysses because it was written while drunk.
I can see some difference between being a diluter of greatness and being “lucky” in Pound’s sense.
e e cummings was a diluter, taking other people’s experiments and turning them into something, well, less. He’s still a good poet, rarely a great one, but his effect ultimately was to dull the blade of avant-garde modernism.
The writer Pound describes in point 4 sounds to me like the MFA product or the gifted drudge. They take something acceptable and, in its own way, graceful from the writing of their time, and they reproduce it. They can’t dilute it, because it’s not in itself terribly concentrated to begin with.
As examples of 4, Pound offers “men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.”