---
title: "Parable of the Sunfish"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:01.010546+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Pound ===
Pound, echoing Cooper, opens ABC of Reading by stating that the correct method for the study of poetry is "the method of contemporary biologists" and that "No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish." Commentators have summarized Pound's position with the term empiricism, but have divided over whether the parable endorses or indicts the idea.
The simplest interpretations in scientific writing, history of science, and literary criticism take the parable at face value, accepting empiricism and observation as legitimate techniques. For example, when writing about stellar atmospheres, Dimitri Mihalas states that "it is specimens, not facts, that are the ultimate empirical currency that we must use if we wish to purchase a valid theory" before beginning a discussion of Pound's sunfish.
Moving from acceptance of empiricism to an understanding of its limitations, Christopher Tilley emphasizes in his comments on "scientific archeology" that Pound's student "was not simply learning about 'reality', the sunfish, but a way of approaching that reality – a discourse bound up in a particular thought tradition (empiricism)". Robert Scholes reaches a similar conclusion, noting that the student "seems to be reporting about a real and solid world in a perfectly transparent language, but actually he is learning how to produce a specific kind of discourse, controlled by a particular scientific paradigm".
Author Bob Perelman takes the suspicion of empiricism one step further in his 1994 The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. Perelman discusses the parable as one of two anecdotes in ABC of Reading that frame Pound's discussion of Chinese ideograms. The former describes attendance at two hypothetical concerts: one of Debussy and another of Ravel. Pound states that a person who attended both concerts knows more about the composers than someone who has only read "ALL of the criticisms that have ever been written of both". Perelman considers the contradiction between "everyone" and "knowledge" to be the key to Pound's thinking: only a gifted or lucky few are able to apprehend the truth (whether by attending the concert or observing the specimen); the rest can only make do with "a fog of clichés, received ideas, second-hand and second-rate opinions, written darkness." With regard to the parable, Perelman observes the lack of "scientific institutions, pedagogic procedures, or communicable terminologies" where any mediating written descriptions ("sunfish", "diplodokus") only serve to obscure knowledge. Knowledge ultimately resides within Agassiz rather than the world, and "[w]hat looks initially like a commitment to empiricism has led instead to an authoritarian idealism."
Two critics have also commented on the parable's implications in describing the nature of knowledge in terms of the decay of Pound's fish. Celeste Goodridge notes that Marianne Moore's 1934 review of Pound's Cantos uses a detailed metaphor of a grasshopper wing to describe the conversations therein. In Goodridge's opinion, Moore's "microscopic examination" both undercuts the work as well as "pays homage, in its precision, to Pound's reverence for 'the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism.'" Goodridge then reproduces the parable in full and comments, "Agassiz teaches Pound that all knowledge is necessarily fragmented and does not constitute a whole." Knowledge of the fish cannot begin until decay has commenced, reducing the specimen to its constituent parts.
Peter Nicholas Baker reaches a fundamentally different conclusion. He begins the discussion of the parable by first quoting Pound on the topic of genius:

The genius can pay in nugget and in lump gold; it is not necessary that he bring up his knowledge into the mint of consciousness, stamp it either into the coin of conscientiously analyzed form-detail knowledge or into the paper money of words before he transmit it.

Baker finds the most striking feature of the parable to be the absence of description of the fish. Baker asks: "Do readers of this anecdote learn about the fish, or rather about a certain kind of authoritarian teaching practice?" Baker claims that Pound's images of coining metal are just as unrealistic as his ideas regarding science and the scientific method. The reader, following Pound's student, reaches knowledge through intuition alone; the decomposing fish, so far as epistemology is concerned, has become "transparent".

== Notes ==

== References ==