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.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Racism, Race
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
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Anger, Temper
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, Art, Arts
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
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
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Reading, Books, Part of The Whole
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Ideas
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature, Books
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
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
—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
Topics: Imagination
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
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: Religion, Churches
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Reading
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
Topics: Authors & Writing
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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
Topics: Art
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
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Passion
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
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
—Ezra Pound
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Originality
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
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
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