Ezra Pound Quotes - Page 7

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.

The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

'Tis 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.

Rhythm must have meaning.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

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.

It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

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

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

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

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.