Quotes By Ezra Pound
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Ezra Pound
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
Ezra Pound
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
Ezra Pound
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
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
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Ezra Pound
The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
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
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
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
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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
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 image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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