In the following essay, Cohen draws parallels between Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" (1913) and the principles outlined by the Austrian-born American composer Arnold Schoenberg in Theory of Harmony (1911), placing both in the destructive phase of the development of new art forms.

SOURCE: "Subversive Pedagogies: Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony and Pound's 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'," in Mosaic, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 49-65.

"The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!"

—Mikhail Bakunin, 1842

"To destroy is always the first step in any creation."

—E.E. Cummings, 1922

The quotations above bracket eighty years of almost continuous upheaval in the arts—battles in which innovative artists challenged the repositories of stifling tradition: the academies, the conservative critics, the bourgeois public. Seen from a historical perspective that has vindicated the avant-garde, these struggles acquire the trappings of heroic myth. Indeed, popular histories of Modernism invest these struggles with...