Instigations: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character

This is Ezra Pound at his most volcanic. Written in 1917, Instigations crackles with the restless energy of a poet who understood that poetry in English had grown stagnant and that only radical intervention could revive it. The collection serves as both excavation and polemic: Pound unearths French poets virtually unknown to English readers, Jules Laforgue's dark wit, Tristan Corbière's ragged romanticism, and uses them as weapons against the sentimentality and vagueness he saw dominating American verse. But this isn't mere appreciation; it's instigation, a provocation to wake up the reader from literary complacency. The famous essay on the Chinese written character, based on Ernest Fenollosa's notes, became the philosophical backbone of Imagism. Pound argued that the ideogram, by presenting action and thing together, embodied the poetic ideal: direct treatment of the 'thing,' no word that does not contribute to the presentation. This short text would reshape modern poetry in English. Pound's critical voice here is merciless, certain, and often very funny. He insults mediocrity with the enthusiasm of a man performing surgery. If you want to understand how Modernism broke with the past, start here.