As for literature
It gives no man a sinecure.
And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.
“And give up verse, my boy,
There’s nothing in it.”

Pound’s lines stress literature’s lack of guaranteed reward: it offers no “sinecure” (a paid position requiring little work) and provides no immediate, reliable recognition of greatness—“no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.” The quoted admonition—“give up verse, my boy”—evokes the discouragement poets routinely face from practical-minded elders, editors, or society at large. Taken together, the passage frames serious writing as a vocation without security, dependent on sustained labor and long time horizons, where value is often legible only retrospectively. It also implies a critique of cultural institutions that fail to recognize innovation when it appears, a recurring theme in modernist self-understanding.