Ezra Pound’s poetry tips; from The Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote that you had four useful hints from living literary predecessors, who were Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, and Robert Bridges. What were these hints?
POUND
Bridges’s was the simplest. Bridges’s was a warning against homophones. Hardy’s was the degree to which he would concentrate on the subject matter, not on the manner. Ford’s in general was the freshness of language. And Yeats you say was the fourth? Well, Yeats by 1908 had written simple lyrics in which there were no departures from the natural order of words.
Biblioklept 