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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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
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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 -
A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
Ezra Pound -
Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
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 -
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.
Ezra Pound -
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound
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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound -
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound -
The artist is the antenna of the race.
Ezra Pound -
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound -
What counts is the cultural level.
Ezra Pound -
The only history that matters is the history we know.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound -
America is a lunatic asylum.
Ezra Pound -
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound -
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.
Ezra Pound -
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Ezra Pound -
It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
Ezra Pound
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Wars are made to make debt.
Ezra Pound -
The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
Ezra Pound -
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
Ezra Pound -
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
Ezra Pound