ABSTRACT
Pound was about fifteen when he decided to be a poet and began to learn the necessary skills. He believed (he wrote twelve years later, in an article, ‘How I Began’) that the ‘Impulse’, as he called it, was from the gods, but that technique was a man's own responsibility; and so he resolved that at thirty he would know more about poetry than any man living: would know the ‘dynamic content’ from the ‘shell’, what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of it was indestructible and could not be lost in translation, and what effects were obtainable in one language only and were incapable of being translated at all. ‘In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages, I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every university regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with “requirements for degrees”.’ Probably his attitude at fifteen was not as hard as he would have us believe, nor his understanding of what he would have to do, to become the poet of his dreams, quite so clear as it was here represented: a hardening had occurred in the meantime, which by 1913 when he wrote the article, was at the heart of his literary programme, and in the heat of battle it no doubt coloured his memory of 19015 but we may accept the article as a guide to his ambition and as an indication of his inkling about the importance of the craft of poetry, even at the age of fifteen.
