Ezra Pound Quotes
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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.
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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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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.
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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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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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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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A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
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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.
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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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The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
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A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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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.
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The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
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Rhythm is form cut into time.
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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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.