Ezra Pound Quotes & Sayings

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance ... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music. — Ezra Pound

The what is so much more important than how. — Ezra Pound

Till now they send him dreams and no more deed;
So doth he flame again with might for action,
Forgetful of the council of the elders,
Forgetful that who rules doth no more battle,
Forgetful that such might no more cleaves to him
So doth he flame again toward valiant doing. — Ezra Pound

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. — Ezra Pound

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten. — Ezra Pound

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

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him. — Ezra Pound

All great art is born of the metropolis. — Ezra Pound

Listen to me, attend me!
And I will breathe into thee a soul,
And thou shalt live for ever. — Ezra Pound

Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire. — Ezra Pound

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

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish. — Ezra Pound

A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour. — Ezra Pound

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

Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing — Ezra Pound

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin. — Ezra Pound

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. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation
— Ezra Pound

Liberty is not a right but a duty. — Ezra Pound

The immense and undeniable loss of freedoms, as they were in 1900, is undeniable. We have seen the acceleration in efficiency of the tyrannizing factors. It's enough to keep a man worried. Wars are made to make debt. I suppose there's a possible out in space satellites and other ways of making debt. — Ezra Pound

Yea, and the little earth crumbles beneath our feet and we endure. — Ezra Pound

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets. — Ezra Pound

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

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled — Ezra Pound

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art. — Ezra Pound

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. — Ezra Pound

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn! — Ezra Pound

The artist is always beginning. — Ezra Pound

Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism ... the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical. — Ezra Pound

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

Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. — Ezra Pound

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution. — Ezra Pound

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

The temple is holy because it is not for sale — Ezra Pound

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough. — Ezra Pound

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

Literature is language charged with meaning — 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

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding. — Ezra Pound

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. — Ezra Pound

Where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard. — Ezra Pound

What thou lovest well remains, — Ezra Pound

I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seem
To mock me now, all night, all night, and
Have I strayed among the cliffs here
They say, some day I'll fall
Down through the sea-bit fissures, and no more
Know the warm cloak of sun, or bathe
The dew across my tired eyes to comfort them.
They try to keep me hid within four walls.
I will not stay! — Ezra Pound

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time. — Ezra Pound

The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand. — Ezra Pound

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight — Ezra Pound

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time. — Ezra Pound

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. — Ezra Pound

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it. — Ezra Pound

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire. — Ezra Pound

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

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity. — Ezra Pound

The Sea of Glass
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them — Ezra Pound

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public. — Ezra Pound

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. — Ezra Pound

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

Left him delighted with the imaginary Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge, — Ezra Pound

Your interest is in the bloody loam but what I'm after is the finished product. — Ezra Pound

And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness — Ezra Pound

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

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe. — Ezra Pound

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood. — Ezra Pound

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

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. — Ezra Pound

The natural object is always the adequate symbol. — Ezra Pound

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
— Ezra Pound

Let the gods speak softly of us — Ezra Pound

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand. — Ezra Pound

Either move or be moved. — Ezra Pound

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

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring. — Ezra Pound

The artist is the antenna of the race. — 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

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth. — Ezra Pound

A heroic figure ... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him. — Ezra Pound

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage — Ezra Pound

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later ... some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie. — Ezra Pound

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

A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at. — Ezra Pound

If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions. — Ezra Pound

Poetry is a very complex art ... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols. — Ezra Pound

Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. — Ezra Pound

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

America is a lunatic asylum. — Ezra Pound

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling. — Ezra Pound

But I am like the grass, I can not love you. — Ezra Pound

Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people's faces, / Will you find your lost dead among them? — Ezra Pound

Properly, we should read for power. — Ezra Pound

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf. — Ezra Pound