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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USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
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Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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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 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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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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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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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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Literature is news that stays news.
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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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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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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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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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Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.
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Rhythm must have meaning.
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What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
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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.
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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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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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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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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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.