Ezra Pound
92 quotes
Biography
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos.
"All great art is born of the metropolis."
"Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
"Literature is news that stays news."
"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight"
"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."
"Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds."
"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding."
"Rhythm must have meaning."
"With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands."
"This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man."
"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, 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."
"It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work."
"Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough."
"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."
"Poetry must be as well written as prose."
"It has been complained, with some justice, that I dump my note-books on the public."
"Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists."
"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."
"Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello.""
"Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
"But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."
"Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence"
"If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good."
"Both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it."