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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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Cities, City Life
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
—Ezra Pound
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 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: Criticism, Opinions
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief
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
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature, Books
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Education
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
—Ezra Pound
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim… lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Birth
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 cliche, not from real life.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Style
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
It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Paradise, Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Civilization
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: Art, Arts, Artists
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame
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
Topics: Books, Reading
Genius … is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Simplicity, Perception
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Christianity
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
—Ezra Pound
Good art however “immoral” is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
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: Arts, Art, Artists
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
Topics: Churches, Religion
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
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
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, Reading, Books
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