Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

Ezra Pound
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Ezra Pound
Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

Ezra Pound
Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

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

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

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