The great modernist poet Ezra Pound said that there were six kinds of writers — inventors, masters, diluters, good writers without salient qualities, Writers of belles-lettres and the starters of crazes.
Brainpickings.org has outlined Pound’s opinions about writers as shared in various works originally published in 1913 and 1934. In the post, they also share Pound’s tips for writers on reading criticism. Check it out:
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.