Murder Your Darlings

Pound was firm that no matter how much the writer likes something on the page, if it unbalances the work, or just plain doesn’t fit, then it should go. “Murder Your Darlings!” was his emphatic dictum. Pound drew blue lines through chunks of Eliot’s work.

I fully concur with the view taken by some major critics in the 1920’s and 1930’s that Eliot’s poetry is “blatant tripe” and although I would rather have not had any poetry from Eliot at all I can thank Pound for at least cutting it down to size.

Eliot was an intelligent, educated man and far superior in ability and intellect to me but he had a particularly circular line in literary criticism. He outlined the characteristics of good poetry in his critical essays and then said “Oh by the way, I’ve written some poetry and it exactly conforms to what I have said is good poetry.”

Snake Oil!

Wikipedia

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling “doctor” with dubious credentials, selling some medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus.