Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Ezra Pound
WOT IZZA COMIN'?
'I'll tell you wot izza comin'
Sochy-lism is a-comin''

Ezra Pound
AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

Ezra Pound
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.

Ezra Pound
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor"... walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

Ezra Pound
And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound
"You damn sadist!" said mr. cummings,
"you try to make people think."

Ezra Pound
Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote make it new
on his bath tub.

Ezra Pound
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which doesn't reveal something…Go in fear of abstractions.

Ezra Pound
Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Ezra Pound
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Ezra Pound
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

Ezra Pound
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Ezra Pound
The tip's a good one, 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.

Ezra Pound
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Ezra Pound
It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work.

Ezra Pound
Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash, but I believe Michelangelo never did, so I suppose it is part of the tradition.

Ezra Pound
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

Ezra Pound
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

Ezra Pound
The art of letters will come to an end before A. D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Ezra Pound
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

Ezra Pound
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.

Ezra Pound
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

Ezra Pound
One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Ezra Pound
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Ezra Pound