Ezra Pound (1885–1972,) fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, was an American poet, translator, editor, and critic. Founder of the Imagist movement in American poetry, Pound was a teacher and a promoter of modernist poets and poetics, and a translator of Oriental and Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Born in Hailey, Idaho, Pound was active in Europe for most of his career. He published his first collection of poems, A Lume Spento (1908; With Tapers Quenched) in Venice. From 1924, he made his home in Italy.
During World War II, he made many pro-Fascist radio broadcasts attacking the American war effort. He was escorted back to America after the war and indicted for treason. However, the trial did not proceed since he was adjudged insane; he was placed in an insane asylum until 1958 when he returned to Italy.
Pound promoted and helped shape the work of such diverse poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot.
Pound is known for his Cantos (1917,) a loosely knit series of poems. He continued publishing Cantos in many installments, via the Pis an Cantos (1948) to Thrones: Cantos 96–109 (1959.) In addition to poetry, he wrote books on literature, music, art, and economics, and translated Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese literature. His other notable works are Translations of Ezra Pound (1933) and Literary Essays (1954.)
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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
Topics: Critics, Criticism
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Intelligence
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
—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
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
Wars are made to make debt.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Madness
One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Hope
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
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
Topics: Music
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Suicide
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Religion, Churches
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Christianity
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Part of The Whole, Books, Reading
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
—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
Topics: Death
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature
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
Topics: Imagination
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Originality
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Change
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
—Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Education
Genius … is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing; yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Despair, Knowledge
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Economy, Economics
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
—Ezra Pound
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
—Ezra Pound
The author’s conviction on this day of 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; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Music
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Ideas
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
Topics: Marriage
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
Topics: Books
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
Topics: Intelligence
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Talent
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
Topics: Opinions, Criticism
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Perception, Simplicity
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
Topics: Literature, Books
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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