Ezra Pound Quotes
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There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
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Rhythm is form cut into time.
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Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'
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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.
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To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
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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.
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The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
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There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
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One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
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A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
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People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.
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The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
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I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
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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.
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I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
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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.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.