Ezra Pound Quotes

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Utter originality is of course out of the question.
Ezra Pound
Utter originality is of course out of the question.
Ezra Pound
If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.
Ezra Pound
Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
Winter is icummen in,Lhude sing Goddamm,Raineth drop and staineth slopAnd how the wind doth ramm!Sing: Goddamm.Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,An ague hath my ham.Freezeth river, turneth liverDamn you, sing: Goddamm.Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,Goddamm.So 'gainst the winter's balmSing Goddamm, damm, sing GoddammSing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,DAMM.
Ezra Pound
I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seemTo mock me now, all night, all night, andHave I strayed among the cliffs hereThey say, some day I'll fallDown through the sea-bit fissures, and no moreKnow the warm cloak of sun, or batheThe dew across my tired eyes to comfort them.They try to keep me hid within four walls.I will not stay!
Ezra Pound
Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick his snotty nose into other men's business or reprove his neighbour for having a set of tropisms different from that of the fanatic's, or for having the courage to live more greatly and openly.The second set of mystic states is manifest in scarcity economists, in repressors etc.The first state is a dynamism. It has, time and again, driven men to great living, it has given them courage to go on for decades in the face of public stupidity. It is paradisical and a reward in itself seeking naught further... perhaps because a feeling of certitude inheres in the state of feeling itself. The glory of life exists without further proof for this mystic.
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
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
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
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. n The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. n The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. n Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. n Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. n The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. n
Ezra Pound
Literature is language charged with meaning
Ezra Pound
No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.And give up verse, my boy,There's nothing in it.Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:Don't kick against the pricks,Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your gameAnd died, there's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning
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. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
Love thou thy dreamAll base love scorning,Love thou the windAnd here take warningThat dreams alone can truly be,For 'tis in dream I come to thee.Ezra Pound, The Songtrad. Ungaretti:Ama il tuo sogno Ama il tuo sognoOgni inferiore amore disprezzando,Il vento amaEd accorgiti quiChe i sogni solo possono veramente essere,Perciò in sogno a raggiungerti m’avvio.
Ezra Pound
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.
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
Listen to me, attend me!And I will breathe into thee a soul,And thou shalt live for ever.
Ezra Pound
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Ezra Pound
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
Ezra Pound
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
Ezra Pound
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.
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
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Ezra Pound
Literature is news which stays news.
Ezra Pound
And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.
Ezra Pound
L'artGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.
Ezra Pound
The Garden En robe de parade. - SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-mealof a sort of emotional anaemia.And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.In her is the end of breeding.Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.She would like some one to speak to her,And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
Ezra Pound
Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.
Ezra Pound