Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.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
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
Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

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

Ezra Pound