Pound Says You Will Find Six Kinds of Writers When You Search for ‘Pure Elements’ in Literature

Checklist — Writers on Writing 5 (Ezra Pound)

From the series on six writers on the craft of writing and their writing processes: today we have Ezra Pound who lists six kinds of writers from inventors who have new processes to writers of belles-lettres who specialise in some particular part of writing. Pound also names two people a writer should not accept criticism from.

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Ezra Pound’s List of the Six Types of Writers, Plus His Two Rules for Forming an Opinion

Considered as one of the influential poets from the last century, Ezra Pound is also a major figure in modernist poetry. He is equally known for his extensive study on numerous forms of poetic forms and experiments in styles as well as contributed to literary movements such as imagism and vorticism.

Imagism: a movement in early 20th-century English and American poetry which sought clarity of expression through the use of precise images
Vorticism: a British artistic movement of 1914–15 influenced by cubism and futurism and favouring harsh, angular, machine-like forms

Pound was a poet, critic and translator. He is considered to be the founder of imagism. In Ezra Pound, Poetry Foundation mentions:

Imagism combined the creation of an “image”—what he defined as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” or an “interpretative metaphor”—with rigorous requirements for writing. About these requirements, Pound was concise but insistent: “1) Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective 2) To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” These criteria meant 1) To carefully observe and describe phenomena, whether emotions, sensations, or concrete entities, and to avoid vague generalities or abstractions. 2) To avoid poetic diction in favor of the spoken language and to condense content, expressing it as concisely and precisely as possible. 3) To reject conventional metrical forms in favor of individualized cadence.

Pound's advice on criticism was first published in 1913, which he later refined and further elaborated on the art of reading and writing in the ABC of Reading (first published in 1933) in which he also put his aesthetic theory down in black and white.