Ezra Pound Quotes

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.

A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.

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

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.

Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

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.

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.

A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures

To be men not destroyers

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

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.

How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity
[...]
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity

All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.

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