Ezra Pound Quotes
-
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
-
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
-
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.
-
All great art is born of the metropolis.
-
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.
-
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
-
Install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
-
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.
-
It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
-
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
-
A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.
-
The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it.
-
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.
-
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
-
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.
-
Where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.
-
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
-
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.
-
'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.
-
Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
-
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.