Ezra Pound Quotations

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

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

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

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

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

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

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

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

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

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

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

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

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

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

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

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.

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

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, until they have seen and lived at least part of their contents

One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Good art however ''immoral'' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

It is difficult to write a paradise 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.

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

You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

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.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.

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

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.''

Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.

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.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

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.

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

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-- Oh how hideous it is To see three generations of one house gathered together! It is like an old tree with shoots, And with some branches rotted and falling.

What counts is the cultural level

And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness

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.

I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it; I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral, Seeing that long standing increases all things regardless of quality.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.

Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

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

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;

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

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.

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.

small talk comes from small bones

The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

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.

You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

Properly, we should read for power.

Song in the Manner of Housman" O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera.... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera....

The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of 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.

'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.

The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

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.

The what is so much more important than how.

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

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

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.

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.