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 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
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Reading
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
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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
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
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Madness
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
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
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
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
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
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
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
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
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Education
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
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
Genius … is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Ideas
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Racism, Race
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
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Change, Books
You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Innovation
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 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
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame
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
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
—Ezra Pound
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
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