Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Ezra Pound
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

Ezra Pound
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

Ezra Pound
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Ezra Pound
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

Ezra Pound
Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you cd. do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint cd. think he understood.

Ezra Pound
Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,
The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,
Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms
Wart of the common-weal,
Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things
Darkness the defiler
Twin evil of envy,
Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things
Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos,
neschek, the crawling evil,
slime, the corrupter of all things,
Poisoner of the fount,
of all fountains, neschek,
The serpent, evil against Nature's increase,
Against beauty

Ezra Pound
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start —
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

Ezra Pound
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

Ezra Pound
And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Ezra Pound
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

Ezra Pound
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

Ezra Pound
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Ezra Pound
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Ezra Pound
Without character you will
be unable to play on that instrument

Ezra Pound
Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Ezra Pound
Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence

Ezra Pound
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Ezra Pound
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Ezra Pound
One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

Ezra Pound
Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

Ezra Pound
The curse of me & my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Ezra Pound
All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.

Ezra Pound
It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved... This hypothesis... would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.

Ezra Pound
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

Ezra Pound
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

Ezra Pound
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles.

Ezra Pound
Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello."

Ezra Pound
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

Ezra Pound