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 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
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
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: Criticism, Critics
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature
The real meditation is… the meditation on one’s identity. Ah, voila une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you’re you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Identity
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
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame
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
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Anger, Temper
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
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
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
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
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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
We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Past, The Past
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
—Ezra Pound
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Religion
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
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Suicide
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Originality
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
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Change, Books
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
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Part of The Whole, Reading
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic—I mean my motion.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Exile
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Reading
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Christianity
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Madness
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
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: Knowledge, Despair
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, Art, Artists
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Economics, Economy
You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Innovation
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
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Stanley Kunitz American Poet
Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
Rod McKuen American Poet
Aaron Copland American Composer
Marianne Moore American Poet
Czeslaw Milosz Polish-American Poet, Novelist
John Cage American Composer
Henry Adams American Historian
Ernest Hemingway American Author