Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Ezra Pound
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

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

Ezra Pound
I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.

Ezra Pound
Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

Ezra Pound
No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

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 concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

Ezra Pound
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

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
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
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

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
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
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
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
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Ezra Pound
Pride, jealousy and possessiveness
3 pains of hell

Ezra Pound
'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