Ezra Pound Modernism Quotes

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. ~ Ezra Pound

Of course when one opens a coffin, one destroys it. Nevertheless a delicate odour of cedarwood will come forth. ~ Miguel Serrano

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

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. ~ Ezra Pound

But I am like the grass, I can not love you. ~ Ezra Pound

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot. ~ Frank Kermode

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

The only history that matters is the history we know. ~ Ezra Pound

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

Artists are the antennae of the race. ~ Ezra Pound

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. ~ Ezra Pound

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

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. ~ Ezra Pound

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring. ~ Ezra Pound

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever. ~ Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language. ~ Pete Hamill

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. ~ Ezra Pound

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. ~ Ezra Pound

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

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

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

End rhymes are not enough. Every word-sound in a poem should find an echo in another, neighbouring word's sound to achieve what Ezra Pound called melopoeia. (This is something like what the Welsh call Cynghanned.) ~ Anne Stevens

Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out. Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant. And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another. The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead. ~ Ezra Pound

No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it. ~ Ezra Pound

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'. ~ Ezra Pound

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

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre fe ~ Frank Kermode

Every great change is simple. ~ Ezra Pound

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE. ~ Ezra Pound

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

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

If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana ... and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation. ~ Ezra Pound

The Encounter"

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin. ~ Ezra Pound

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

Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection - /in the end - that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria ~ Ezra Pound

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. ~ Ezra Pound

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs. ~ Sally Mann

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. ~ Ezra Pound

Separation on the River Kiang KO-JIN goes west from Ko-kaku-ro, The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river. His lone sail blots the far sky. And now I see only the river, The long Kiang, reaching heaven. Taking ~ Ezra Pound

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing. ~ Ezra Pound

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it. ~ Ezra Pound

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question. ~ Ezra Pound

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

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') ~ Ezra Pound