Make it new
Pound's imperative to renew literary tradition by actively reworking it, not discarding it. Innovation comes from re-energizing inherited forms so they live again in the present.
Make It New
6 ideas
Criticism by direct examination
Pound judges literature through close comparison of concrete examples across languages and eras rather than abstract theory. The critic sets exhibits side by side and lets the reader see the difference.
The image as concentrated energy
Poetic language should deliver an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Pound prizes precision and compression, treating the image as a charged vortex of meaning.
Translation as living criticism
Pound treats translation and anthology-making as active critical acts that carry live tradition forward across cultures. What survives translation reveals what is essential in a work.
Precise language as cultural health
Clear, exact use of words is tied to the vitality of a civilization, and sloppy language signals decay. Pound links the writer's precision to civic and cultural responsibility.
Pound's Paris bookstall find: Divus's Homer
In 'Early Translators of Homer,' Pound says he picked up a Latin Odyssey by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus, printed in Paris by Christian Wechel in 1538, from a bookstall on the Paris quais sometime between 1906 and 1910. He sets Divus's crib-like Latin line by line against the English Homers of Chapman and Pope. He argues that the obscure Renaissance hack's version keeps more of Homer's movement and matter than the celebrated English versions, and he later reworked the Nekuia passage from it into his own Canto I.