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Ezra Pound Quotes
1885–1972 United States
Ezra Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early to mid-20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several Modernist movements including Imagism and Vorticism.
United States Anti-communists Composers Critics Musicians Also known as: Pound, Ezra
Random Ezra Pound quote
58 quotes
I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America and all America is an insane asylum.
And even I can remember
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
Axiomata (1921)
The author's conviction on this day of the 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.
ABC of Reading (1934)
How mean thy hates
My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.
I have tried to write Paradise
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.
What thou lovest well remains,
If a man have not order within him
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
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.
The Spirit of Romance (1910)
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.
AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.
ABC of Reading (1934)
Winter is icumen in,
And she is dying piece-meal
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