摘自埃兹拉·庞德(Ezra Pound)写于1918年的《回顾》
Use no superfluous words, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Do not use such expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre words what has already been done in good prose. I don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakable difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.
Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be “influenced” by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.
Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his despatches of “dove-grey” hills or else it was “pearl-pale”, I cannot remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.
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