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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound
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Glance is the enemy of vision.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound -
There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.
Ezra Pound -
Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.
Ezra Pound -
Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
Ezra Pound
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Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later . . . some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.
Ezra Pound -
That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.
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 -
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
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 -
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.
Ezra Pound
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
Ezra Pound -
Liberty is not a right but a duty.
Ezra Pound -
And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.
Ezra Pound -
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 -
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
Ezra Pound -
My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.
Ezra Pound
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No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound -
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.
Ezra Pound -
All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound -
The natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Ezra Pound