27 Ezra Pound Quotes

Ezra Pound quotes

1. Image:that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

2. Poetry must be as well written as prose.

3. Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one 'Sordello.'

4. Make it new!

5. But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

6. The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

7. The author's conviction on this day of the 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.

8. Literature is news that STAYS news.

9. Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

10. The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

11. 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.

12. Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

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

14. Nothing written for pay is worth printing. ONLY what has been written AGAINST the market.

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

1. A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

2. It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.

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

4. A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at.

5. 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.

6. Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

7. where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

8. Liberty is not a right but a duty.

9. The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

10. In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

11. I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

12. I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.