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
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Madness
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
The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Art
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
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
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief
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
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
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
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Freedom
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
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
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
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