Ezra Pound Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

• The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

  Ezra Pound

  Death, Lying, Heart

  Ezra Pound (2015). “Delphi Poetical Works of Ezra Pound (Illustrated)”, p.468, Delphi Classics

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• In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

  Ezra Pound

  Order, Ideas, Rose

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• If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

  Ezra Pound

  Believe, Views, Church Music

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• From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

  Ezra Pound

  Tree, Religion, Together

  Ezra Pound (1996). “The Cantos of Ezra Pound”, p.625, New Directions Publishing

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• small talk comes from small bones

  Ezra Pound

  Bones, Small Talk

  Ezra Pound, Richard Sieburth (2010). “New Selected Poems and Translations”, p.99, New Directions Publishing

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• Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

  Ezra Pound

  History, Literature, Checks

  ABC of Reading (1934) ch. 1

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• 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 Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

  Ezra Pound

  Elysium, Heritage, World

  Cantos no. 81, l. 134 (1948)

  53 Copy quote

• The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

  Ezra Pound

  Degrees, Language, Form

  Sophocles, Ezra Pound, Rudd Fleming, Carey Perloff (1990). “Elektra”, p.17, New Directions Publishing

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

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Real, Sculpture

  69 Copy quote

• No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

  Ezra Pound

  Teacher, Real, Ignorance

  ABC of Reading (1934) ch. 8

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• A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

  Ezra Pound

  Hope, Men, Civilization

  Ezra Pound (1952). “Guide to Kulchur”, p.144, New Directions Publishing

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

  Ezra Pound

  Thinking, Russia, America

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• Artists are the antennae of the race.

  Ezra Pound

  Artist, Race

  'Literary Essays' (1954)'Henry James'

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• And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.

  Ezra Pound

  Dust, Sweat, Orange

  Ezra Pound, Richard Sieburth (2010). “New Selected Poems and Translations”, p.152, New Directions Publishing

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• As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

  Ezra Pound

  Giving Up, Boys, Men

  'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (1920) 'Mr Nixon'

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

  Ezra Pound

  Essence, Consciousness, Reason

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• 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.

  Ezra Pound

  Music, New Year, Taken

  ABC of Reading (1934) "Warning"

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• I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Criticism, Literature

  Ezra Pound (1991). “Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose: 1920-1927, C522-C599a”

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• Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.

  Ezra Pound

  Taken, Genius, Way

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• 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

  Mean, Men, Made

  Ezra Pound (2010). “ABC of Reading”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

  Ezra Pound

  Stress, Objectivity, Expression

  Letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan. 1915

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

  Ezra Pound

  Real, Eye, Light

  Ezra Pound, Harriet Zinnes (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.173, New Directions Publishing

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• 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.

  Ezra Pound

  Death, Men, Promise

  Ezra Pound (1970). “A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska”, p.118, New Directions Publishing

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

  Ezra Pound

  Fear, Writing, Optimistic

  Ezra Pound (2003). “Poems and Translations”

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• Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family--
  Oh how hideous it is
  To see three generations of one house gathered together!
  It is like an old tree with shoots,
  And with some branches rotted and falling.

  Ezra Pound

  Fall, House, Tree

  Ezra Pound (2015). “Delphi Poetical Works of Ezra Pound (Illustrated)”, p.433, Delphi Classics

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