Pound Described Poetry As Original Research In

As I Started Reading About It, I Saw That At The Beginning Of The 19th Century, Outside Of New England - Which Was An Unusually Literate Place - Practically No One Could Read Or Write. And Even In New England, The Overall Rate Was Only About 60 Percent. That Still Means Four Out Of 10 People Couldn't Put Their Name To A Will.

It Turns Out - This Is A Metaphor Out Of [charles] Dickens - That The Raw Sewage Emptied Into The Anacostia Comes From The Federal Triangle. I Have A Sewer Map, And On It You Can See The Pipe From Which Congressional Wastes Empty Into The River That Then Flows Through The Black Neighborhoods Of Washington, D.c. It Is Very Expensive To Do Anything About The River, But Somebody's Working On It.

It Seems Like Every Ten Years There's A Book That Says That Poetry Used To Be Popular, And Now It's Not, But We Really Have No Way Of Knowing, In Terms Of Relative Size Of Audience And Other Things, Exactly Who Readers Were.

I Suppose There's Something To Be Said For The Sheer Reinforcement Of Our Beliefs, But Really I Think Poetry Is More Useful As Disenchantment Than Enchantment.

It's The Same With This Idea Of A Literate Public, And Also Of A Democracy In Which People Have Access To And Really Read The Best Books. It Turns Out That Even When You Create This Kind Of Environment, Maybe Only 10 Percent Of The People Want To Read Those Books.