Erza Pound: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Ezra Pound, Poet, Rutherford, New Jersey, at the home of William Carlos Williams, June 30, 1958. ©Richard Avedon.
Good language, bad language:
Interviewer: One point of connection between literature and politics which you make in your writing interests me particularly. In the ABC of Reading you say that good writers are those who keep the language efficient, and that this is their function. You disassociate this function from party. Can a man of the wrong party use language efficiently?
Pound: Yes. That's the whole trouble! A gun is just as good, no matter who shoots it.
Interviewer: Can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder? Suppose good language is used to forward bad government? Doesn't bad government make bad language?
Pound: Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out. Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant. And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another. The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead.
Interview: Where do ignorance and innocence end and the chicanery begin?
Pound: There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five percent.
Interviewer: What kind of action can you hope to take?
Pound: The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first right, if there is going to be any intellect left.
His Paris Review interview was published in 1962.
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