Ezra Pound Quotes
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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.
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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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.
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The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
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Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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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.
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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
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And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
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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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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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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
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Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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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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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
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Quiet this metal! Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire. Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate. Let them draw together the bones of the metal.
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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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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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.
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.