Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
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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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The real trouble with war modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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The only history that matters is the history we know.
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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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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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Small talk comes from small bones.
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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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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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Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
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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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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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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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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 thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
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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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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 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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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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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.