Make It New
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Make it new" is the modernist credo of the poet Ezra Pound.
The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the modernism's approach towards the obsolete.
This is from Pound’s 1928 translation of Ta Hsio, The Great Digest (or Great Learning), a central Confucian text dating from the fifth to second century BC. It is crucial to remember: engagement with the past is inextricably linked to Pound’s conception of “make it new”: we can see this in the subjects he discusses in the 1934 essay collection of the same name (medieval troubadours, Elizabethan classicists, translators of Greek, 19th Century French Poets); we can certainly see it in his poems, from early lyrics to late Cantos; and we see it here, in Pound’s interest in the letters on T’ang’s bathtub.
1) In letters of gold on T’ang’s bathtub:
As the sun makes it new
Day by day make it new
Yet again make it new
2) It is said in the K’ang proclamation:
He is risen, renewing the people.
3) The Odes say:
Although Chou was an ancient kingdom/
the celestial destiny/came again
down on it new.
See also
- The modernist manifesto Ornament and crime (1908).
- Motto