Ezra Pound Quotes
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Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
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What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
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The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.
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See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
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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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I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
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I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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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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It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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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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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
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Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
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Presentation, not reference.
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Every great change is simple.
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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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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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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.