An artist doesn't live in some geographical abstraction, superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the nonimagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world, nor does he live in some so-called universe, nor does he live in any number of "worlds" or in any number of "universes." As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote, they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being.

Re Ezra Pound (p. 69) - i : six nonlectures (1953)