Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered...

Ezra Pound
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

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

Ezra Pound
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.

Ezra Pound
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

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
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
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back;

Ezra Pound
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

Ezra Pound
Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

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
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.

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
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound