Ezra Pound Quotes

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

America is a lunatic asylum.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better.

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

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.

Either move or be moved.

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire.

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good

She is submarine, she is an octopus, she is
A biological process,
So Arnaut turned there
Above him the wave pattern cut in the stone
Spire-top alevel the well-curb
And the tower with cut stone above that, saying,
"I am afraid of the life after death."
and after a pause:
"Now, at least, I have shocked him.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance ... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection - / We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

Yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

دختر

درختي به دستانم سبز شده,
شيره بر بازوانم جوشيده,
درخت در سينه‏ام شكفته --
سر به زير,
شاخه‏ها ,چون بازوان, از درونم مي‏بالند.

درخت هستي تو ,
خزه‌اي تو ,
بنفشه‏هايي كه باد در او مي‌پيچد,
كودكي هستي بلند بالا ,
و جهان اين همه را حماقت مي‌داند
::
A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast--
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child -- so high -- you are,
And all this is folly to the world

The what is so much more important than how.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati ... when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Presentation, not reference ...

When you start searching for 'pure elements' in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn't do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is 'healthy'. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante's time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare's time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn't really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn't be considered as 'great men' or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able 'to see the wood for the trees'. He may know what he 'likes'. He may be a 'compleat book-lover', with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings,

The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.

Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

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.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic
I mean my motion.

The Lake Isle
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

When the mind swings by a grass-blade
an ant's forefoot shall save you

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

And I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts.

No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

What thou lovest well remains,

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

What thou lovest well is
thy true heritage
what thou lovest well shall
not be reft from thee

To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.

Envoi"

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

The jargon of 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.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

There is something so degrading - at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade - that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, "he does too much.

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. Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind.

More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.

O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later ... some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.

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.

We claim no glory. If the tempest rolls
About us we have fear, and then
Having so small a stake grow bold again.
We know not definitely even this
But 'cause some vague half knowing half doth miss
Our consciousness and leaves us feeling
That somehow all is well, that sober, reeling
From the last carouse, or in what measure
Of so called right or so damned wrong our leisure
Runs out uncounted sand beneath the sun,
That, spite your carping, still the thing is done
With some deep sanction, that, we know not how,
Sans thought gives us this feeling; you allow
That this not need we know our every thought
Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought
Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit,
Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit
And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
(excerpt from 'The Garrett')

Go in fear of abstractions.

The Garden
En robe de parade.
- Samain
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

Till now they send him dreams and no more deed;
So doth he flame again with might for action,
Forgetful of the council of the elders,
Forgetful that who rules doth no more battle,
Forgetful that such might no more cleaves to him
So doth he flame again toward valiant doing.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

Take thought.
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don't like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good tastes if you haven't naturally got it.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

Wars are made to make debt.

Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.

Literature is language charged with meaning

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cucc.
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu,
Sing cuccu!