Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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
You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back door and take the swag.

Ezra Pound
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle 'promise' from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

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

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

Ezra Pound
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.

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

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

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
All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.

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
My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.

Ezra Pound
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
[...]
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
[...]
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly

Ezra Pound
One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one was right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say 17 or 23.

Ezra Pound
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Ezra Pound