110+ Ezra Pound Quotes On Modernist, Experimental And Influential

Ezra Pound was an American poet, critic, and translator who was a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He was a leading figure in the Imagist movement and a major influence on the development of English literature. Pound was also an important figure in the development of the modernist movement in music and literature, and he was a major influence on the works of T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ezra Pound on love, modernist, experimental.

Top 10 Ezra Pound Quotes

1. The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
2. The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
3. Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
4. Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
5. 'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!
6. The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
7. The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
8. What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
9. 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
10. What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

Ezra Pound Image Quotes

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

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

Ezra Pound Short Quotes

• What thou lovest well remains.
• Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
• All great art is born of the metropolis.
• A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
• Wars are made to make debt.
• Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
• America is a lunatic asylum.
• Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
• I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
• The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

Ezra Pound Quotes About Books

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

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning. — Ezra Pound

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

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. — Ezra Pound

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. — Ezra Pound

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

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. — Ezra Pound

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

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity. — Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound Quotes About Writing

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

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market. — Ezra Pound

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

install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time. — 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 artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. — Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound Quotes About People

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

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

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

Ezra Pound Quotes About Real

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

No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. — Ezra Pound

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

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and clich?, not from real life. — Ezra Pound

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

The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voil? une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voil? une chose! — Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound Quotes About Music

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

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval. — Ezra Pound

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Ezra Pound Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. — 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 Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage. — 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

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

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

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates. — Ezra Pound

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values. — 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

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular. — 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

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

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it. — 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

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

Rhythm must have meaning. — Ezra Pound

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

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you. — Ezra Pound

The artist is the antenna of the race. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. — Ezra Pound

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown. — Ezra Pound

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations. — Ezra Pound

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

Every great change is simple. — 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

It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images. — 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

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity. — Ezra Pound

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

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value. — 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

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. — 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 curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort. — 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

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

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

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

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

I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion. — Ezra Pound

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art. — Ezra Pound

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct. — 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 difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring. — Ezra Pound

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. — Ezra Pound

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

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. — 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. — Ezra Pound

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

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. — Ezra Pound

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

Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any damn fool can be spontaneous. — Ezra Pound

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say. — Ezra Pound

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry — 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

Life Lessons by Ezra Pound

1. Ezra Pound's life teaches us that it is important to stand up for what we believe in, even if it means going against the grain.
2. He also reminds us that it is important to take risks and be open to new ideas and experiences.
3. Finally, Pound's life also shows us the power of creativity and how it can be used to make a positive impact on the world.