leisurely Chaucer.

Good prose will do you no harm. There is good discipline to
be had by trying to write it. Translation is also good
training.

The emphasis here is certainly on discipline and form. The
Chicago _Tribune_ recognized this as "sound sense," adding:

If this is Imagism ... we are for establishing Imagism by
constitutional amendment and imprisoning without recourse to
ink or paper all "literary" ladies or gents who break any of
these canons.

But other reviewers were less approving. While the writer in the
_Nation_, quoted above, dreads the anarchy impending, Mr.
William Archer was terrified at the prospect of hieratic
formalisation. Mr. Archer believes in the simple untaught muse:

Mr. Pound's commandments tend too much to make of poetry a
learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild
of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and
simplicity are excluded.... A great deal of the best poetry
in the world has very little technical study behind it....
There are scores and hundreds of people in England who could
write this simple metre (i.e. of "A Shropshire Lad")
successfully.

To be hanged for a cat and drowned for a rat is, perhaps,
sufficient exculpation.