Quotes About Ezra Pound

#1. Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

Joseph Epstein

#2. A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
(on Ezra Pound)

Gertrude Stein

#3. I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.

Stephen Malkmus

#4. End rhymes are not enough. Every word-sound in a poem should find an echo in another, neighbouring word's sound to achieve what Ezra Pound called melopoeia. (This is something like what the Welsh call Cynghanned.)

Anne Stevens

#5. Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

Jacques Barzun

#6. I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it.

Sally Mann

#7. Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

#8. [On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

Gertrude Stein

#9. Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.

Pete Hamill

#10. Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers.

Bob Dylan

#11. My best guess is that my garbled allusion to Ezra Pound in the following must have come from my parents' reading aloud. The Askari fell off the ostrich In the rain Huge sing Goddamn And what became of the ostrich? Huge sing Goddamn

Richard Dawkins

#12. T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#13. 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.

Ezra Pound

#14. The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

Ezra Pound

#15. I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

Ezra Pound

#16. I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality.

Ezra Pound

#17. 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.

Ezra Pound

#18. Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding ... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

Ezra Pound

#19. The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

Ezra Pound

#20. Technique is the test of sincerity.

Ezra Pound

#21. Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Ezra Pound

#22. The artist is always beginning.

Ezra Pound

#23. Literature is news which stays news.

Ezra Pound

#24. When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Ezra Pound

#25. There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.

Ezra Pound

#26. I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.

Ezra Pound

#27. Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Ezra Pound

#28. Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

Ezra Pound

#29. To break the pentameter, that was the first heave

Ezra Pound

#30. It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

Ezra Pound

#31. Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Ezra Pound

#32. L'art
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

Ezra Pound

#33. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound

#34. The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Ezra Pound

#35. 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;

Ezra Pound

#36. And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring's end,
confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking
There is no end of things in the heart.

Ezra Pound

#37. The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Ezra Pound

#38. A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

Ezra Pound

#39. Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Ezra Pound

#40. Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

Ezra Pound

#41. The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.

Ezra Pound

#42. With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Ezra Pound

#43. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

Ezra Pound

#44. Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

Ezra Pound

#45. Literature is news that stays news.

Ezra Pound

#46. This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Ezra Pound

#47. 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.

Ezra Pound

#48. And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound

#49. Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cucc.
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu,
Sing cuccu!

Ezra Pound

#50. As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

Ezra Pound

#51. Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Ezra Pound

#52. A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Ezra Pound

#53. I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

Ezra Pound

#54. 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.

Ezra Pound

#55. 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.

Ezra Pound

#56. In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality
the principle of order versus the split atom.

Ezra Pound

#57. Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities -

Ezra Pound

#58. 'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

Ezra Pound

#59. America is a lunatic asylum.

Ezra Pound

#60. Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Ezra Pound

#61. There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Anna Quindlen

#62. Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

Ezra Pound

#63. It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

Ezra Pound

#64. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Ezra Pound

#65. Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

Ezra Pound

#66. Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Ezra Pound

#67. I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

Ezra Pound

#68. There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

Ezra Pound

#69. America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

Ezra Pound

#70. Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

Ezra Pound

#71. Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr.

Ezra Pound

#72. No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Ezra Pound

#73. Yea, and the little earth crumbles beneath our feet and we endure.

Ezra Pound

#74. ALBA from "Langue d'Oc" When the nightingale to his mate Sings day-long and night late My love and I keep state In bower, In flower, 'Till the watchman on the tower Cry: "Up! Thou rascal, Rise, I see the white Light And the night Flies.

Ezra Pound

#75. 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.

Ezra Pound

#76. People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Ezra Pound

#77. Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
(excerpt from 'The Garrett')

Ezra Pound

#78. 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

#79. And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

Ezra Pound

#80. The Encounter"

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

Ezra Pound

#81. Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

Ezra Pound

#82. Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

Ezra Pound

#83. The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

Ezra Pound

#84. Rhythm must have meaning.

Ezra Pound

#85. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.

Ezra Pound

#86. There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

Ezra Pound

#87. A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Ezra Pound

#88. There is the mystery of the scattering, the fact that the people who presumably understand each other are geographically scattered. A man who fits in his milieu as Frost does, is to be considered a happy man.

Ezra Pound

#89. 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

#90. I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

Ezra Pound

#91. 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.

Ezra Pound

#92. Things have ends (or scopes) and beginnings. To/ know what precedes and what follows will assist yr/ comprehension of process.

Ezra Pound

#93. 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.

Ezra Pound

#94. What thou lovest well is
thy true heritage
what thou lovest well shall
not be reft from thee

Ezra Pound

#95. The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

Ezra Pound

#96. A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

Ezra Pound

#97. Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.

Ezra Pound

#98. Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Ezra Pound

#99. A heroic figure ... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.

Ezra Pound

#100. In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Ezra Pound