The way reading a certain writer for an hour or so starts making your own thoughts assume the same stylistic shape. It's particularly strong with Roland Barthes and John Ashbery, in my case. Reading Harry Mathews' 'Twenty Lines a Day," I could tell when he had been reading Barthes, because he started to sound like "Roland Barthes par lui-meme."

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I had always taken Pound's phrase "as well written as prose" as ironical in some sense: verse is the more demanding form and should obviously be BETTER written than prose. I took him to mean that if verse is obviously worse written, doesn't come up to the lower standard of prose, it is not worth bothering with. Other commentary on Pound I have seen takes him to mean that the poet should come up to the high standards of a Flaubert or Henry James.