The ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound
Published 1934 · 42,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The ABC of Reading to read?
The ABC of Reading scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Technical poetic vocabulary delivered in deliberately plain prose.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Abstractions are always grounded in specific textual examples.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- High density of critical judgments and specimen texts per page.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct prescriptive argument throughout.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical not symbolic in orientation.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Pound's characteristic ironic contempt for academic poetry criticism.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each chapter delivers its verdict without ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Loosely sequenced chapters and exercises with no overarching argument arc.
How The ABC of Reading is regarded
The ABC of Reading holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.