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Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound
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And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
Ezra Pound -
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound -
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
Ezra Pound
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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.
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 -
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound -
Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
Ezra Pound
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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 -
Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
Ezra Pound -
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
Ezra Pound -
In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
Ezra Pound -
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound