Ezra Pound Quotes

To be men not destroyers

Both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place

I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America and all America is an insane asylum.

Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

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

Not one man in a thousand can be aroused to an interest in economics until he definitely suffers from the effects of an evil system.

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.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay 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.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.