A Few Dont's by an Imagiste by Ezra Pound 1913

[wasellajam]

“ Vide further Vildrac and Duhamel’s notes on rhyme in “Technique Poetique.”

That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original.”

We’ve had a thread on the Pen about this.

“ Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.”

Is good advice

I know! The validity of translations comes up often, that's a memorable way to look at it. And the separation of the mind from meaning as a way to develop a sense of meter is interesting.

This is one of them I thought you would enjoy:

"Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counter-point and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them. "