Ezra Pound's Quotes & Sayings

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

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good — Ezra Pound

Song in the Manner of Housman O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera ... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera ... — Ezra Pound

Poetry must be as well written as prose. — Ezra Pound

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

Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man. — 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

The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic. — Ezra Pound

I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have. — Sam Hamill

I once thought that The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I'm not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what's in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you'll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don't get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole. — Miguel Syjuco

One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something. — Richard Misrach

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. — Ezra Pound

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

Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality. — Ezra Pound

The sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable". — 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

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

Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village ... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating? — Gertrude Stein

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

The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means. — 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

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me
For here was love, was not to be drowned out.
And here desire, not to be kissed away.
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me. — Ezra Pound

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail. — 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

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

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

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

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

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing. — Ezra Pound

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

Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out. Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant. And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another. The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead. — Ezra Pound

Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.
And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick his snotty nose into other men's business or reprove his neighbour for having a set of tropisms different from that of the fanatic's, or for having the courage to live more greatly and openly.
The second set of mystic states is manifest in scarcity economists, in repressors etc.
The first state is a dynamism. It has, time and again, driven men to great living, it has given them courage to go on for decades in the face of public stupidity. It is paradisical and a reward in itself seeking naught further ... perhaps because a feeling of certitude inheres in the state of feeling itself. The glory of life exists without further proof for this mystic. — Ezra Pound

No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it. — 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

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. — Ezra Pound

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

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

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands. — Ezra Pound

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

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

We claim no glory. If the tempest rolls
About us we have fear, and then
Having so small a stake grow bold again.
We know not definitely even this
But 'cause some vague half knowing half doth miss
Our consciousness and leaves us feeling
That somehow all is well, that sober, reeling
From the last carouse, or in what measure
Of so called right or so damned wrong our leisure
Runs out uncounted sand beneath the sun,
That, spite your carping, still the thing is done
With some deep sanction, that, we know not how,
Sans thought gives us this feeling; you allow
That this not need we know our every thought
Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought
Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit,
Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit
And serve our jape's turn for a night or two. — Ezra Pound

When the mind swings by a grass-blade
an ant's forefoot shall save you — Ezra Pound

Envoi"

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone. — Ezra Pound

There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th'eternal embers.
We are not shut from the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysophrase.
Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee
Nature herself's turned metaphysical,
Who can look at that blue and not believe? — Ezra Pound

Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. — Ezra Pound

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. — Ezra Pound

Hardy's astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy's impressions of life. — Geoffrey Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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. — Ezra Pound

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don't like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good tastes if you haven't naturally got it. — Ezra Pound

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

Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. — Ezra Pound

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible. — Ezra Pound

My dear woman, our greatest problem is
that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water) — Billy Marshall Stoneking

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

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

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

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden. — Ezra Pound

Either move or be moved. — Ezra Pound

The Garden
En robe de parade.
- Samain
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion. — Ezra Pound

The Lake Isle
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time. — Ezra Pound

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

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 committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention - and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread. — 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

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. — Ezra Pound

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,
Goddamm.
So 'gainst the winter's balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,
DAMM. — Ezra Pound

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction. — 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

What thou lovest well is
thy true heritage
what thou lovest well shall
not be reft from thee — Ezra Pound

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. — Ezra Pound

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts. — Ezra Pound

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. — Ezra Pound

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

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

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. — Gertrude Stein

If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana ... and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation. — Ezra Pound

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

Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations. — Ezra Pound