ABC of Reading was published by Yale University Press in 1934 and is Pound’s most accessible prose work — a primer on reading literature that distills his critical principles into a form designed for students who “can no longer be said to have read anything.” It is opinionated, dogmatic, frequently wrong, and brilliantly stimulating. Like all of Pound’s criticism, it insists that literature is an art — a made thing to be judged by its making — not a vehicle for ideas, morals, biography, or social commentary.
The Book
Pound organizes his argument around the principle that “literature is language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” He identifies three ways this charging occurs:
Phanopoeia — the casting of images on the visual imagination. (Imagism.)
Melopoeia — the charging of language with musical properties: rhythm, sound, the interplay of vowels and consonants.
Logopoeia — “the dance of the intellect among words”: irony, wit, the play of one meaning against another.
The book proceeds by example rather than argument. Pound presents poems — from Homer through the troubadours through Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the moderns — and asks the reader to look at what is actually happening on the page. He is ruthless in his exclusions: Virgil is “a second-rater,” Milton is “rhetorician and not poet,” most of the English canon is deadwood. Only writers who “make it new” — who add something to the technical resources of the art — earn Pound’s respect.
Method
The pedagogical method is aggressive: Pound does not explain why a poem is good; he presents it and dares you to see for yourself. If you cannot hear the difference between Chaucer and Spenser, between Catullus and Virgil, between Dante and Petrarch, no amount of explanation will help. The ear must be trained by exposure to the best.
This anti-explanatory stance made the book both liberating and infuriating. Liberating because it treated readers as intelligent enough to perceive quality directly; infuriating because Pound’s judgments are presented as self-evident truths when they are often highly debatable opinions.
Collecting ABC of Reading
First edition (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1934): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- Yale University Press imprint
- First printing (verify with publisher’s records)
- 206 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $200–$500. An academic press publication with a modest first printing.
Signed copies: $800–$2,000.
First UK edition (George Routledge, London, 1934): Published the same year. Similar values.
The book’s status as a pedagogical classic — continuously assigned in literature courses, continuously in print — ensures steady demand. It is often the first Pound prose that readers encounter, and for many it remains the most useful.