“Language”
by
Ezra Pound
from A Retrospect
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Do’t think any intelligent person is going to be decieved when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.
Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.
Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his despatches of “dove-grey” hills, or else it was “pearl-pale,” I can not remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.
Biblioklept 
Constructive advice for the aspiring writer and poet.
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This is fantastic advice. Sometimes, I feel that criticism and editing are much more difficult and even more intriguing than writing. You can write with your gut, but you need a sharp mind to apply these points.
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Pound was an imagist, but he was universally correct when he said that “what the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow”. Even despite his disproportionate effect on contemporary poetry, he himself would likely admit that this advice wouldn’t get you far in today’s poetry world – rightly so.
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