Pound Ezra Quotes & Sayings

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring. — Ezra Pound

The what is so much more important than how. — 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

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea. — Ezra Pound

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

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

I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim ... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti. — 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

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

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

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself. — 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

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

small talk comes from small bones — 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

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

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt. — Ezra Pound

Properly, we should read for power. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

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

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 thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole) — 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

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

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection - / We shall get ourselves rather disliked. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

Literature is news that stays news. — Ezra Pound

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

Artists are the antennae of the race. — 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

Literature is news which stays news. — Ezra Pound

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better. — Ezra Pound

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration. — 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

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