page_title: Parable of the Sunfish
section_title: ABC of Reading
hierarchical_section_title: Parable of the Sunfish / Context / ABC of Reading
caption_attribution_description: Louis Agassiz Русский: Жан Луи Родольф Агассис
context_page_description: "The Parable of the Sunfish" is an anecdote with which Ezra Pound opens ABC of Reading, a 1934 work of literary criticism. Pound uses this anecdote to emphasize an empirical approach for learning about art, in contrast to relying on commentary rooted in abstraction. While the parable is based on students' recollections of Louis Agassiz's teaching style, Pound's retelling diverges from these sources in several respects. The parable has been used to illustrate the benefits of scientific thinking, but more recent literary criticism has split on whether the parable accurately reflects the scientific process and calls into question Pound's empirical approach to literature.
context_section_description: Pound opens ABC of Reading with the following pronouncement:
  The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another. No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the sunfish.
  In the parable, a graduate student is sent to noted biologist Louis Agassiz to complete his education, and Agassiz asks the student three times to describe a sunfish specimen. The student replies with, in turn, the common name of the fish, a brief summary of the species, and a four-page essay on the species. Agassiz finally tells the student to "look at the fish" and "[a]t the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it." The text of the parable itself spans 131 words over sixteen lines and is often reproduced in full when cited.
  Pound contrasts this empiricism against knowledge gained through increasingly abstract definitions. As an example, Pound relates what might happen if a European is asked to define "red". After the initial response that red is a color, Pound imagines asking for a definition of color and having it described in terms of vibration, with vibration then defined in terms of energy, and that successive abstractions eventually reach a level where language has lost its power. Returning to empiricism, Pound reminds the reader that the progress of science increased rapidly once "Bacon had suggested the direct examination of phenomena, and after Galileo and others had stopped discussing things so much, and had begun really to look at them". Pound provides several other examples of the same contrasting ideas throughout the first chapter, ranging over topics as diverse as chemistry, Chinese writing, and Stravinsky. At the end of the chapter he summarizes his argument by claiming abstraction does not expand knowledge.
caption: Louis Agassiz
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