Ezra Pound Quotes about Art

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

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

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

Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".

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

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

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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.

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

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

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.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

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.