Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

Without character you will
be unable to play on that instrument

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

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

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
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
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No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.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
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
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
No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

Ezra Pound
We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

Ezra Pound
Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Ezra Pound
Install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

Ezra Pound
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.

Ezra Pound
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Ezra Pound
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

Ezra Pound
Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Ezra Pound
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

Ezra Pound
A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at.

Ezra Pound
And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness

Ezra Pound
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

Ezra Pound
In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Ezra Pound
Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.

Ezra Pound
Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.

Ezra Pound
It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

Ezra Pound
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

Ezra Pound
Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

Ezra Pound
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.

Ezra Pound
Quiet this metal!
Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire.
Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate.
Let them draw together the bones of the metal.

Ezra Pound