Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Ezra Pound (American Poet, Critic)

Ezra Pound (1885–1972,) fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, was an American poet, translator, editor, and critic. Founder of the Imagist movement in American poetry, Pound was a teacher and a promoter of modernist poets and poetics, and a translator of Oriental and Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Born in Hailey, Idaho, Pound was active in Europe for most of his career. He published his first collection of poems, A Lume Spento (1908; With Tapers Quenched) in Venice. From 1924, he made his home in Italy.

During World War II, he made many pro-Fascist radio broadcasts attacking the American war effort. He was escorted back to America after the war and indicted for treason. However, the trial did not proceed since he was adjudged insane; he was placed in an insane asylum until 1958 when he returned to Italy.

Pound promoted and helped shape the work of such diverse poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot.

Pound is known for his Cantos (1917,) a loosely knit series of poems. He continued publishing Cantos in many installments, via the Pis an Cantos (1948) to Thrones: Cantos 96–109 (1959.) In addition to poetry, he wrote books on literature, music, art, and economics, and translated Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese literature. His other notable works are Translations of Ezra Pound (1933) and Literary Essays (1954.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Ezra Pound

Wars are made to make debt.
Ezra Pound
Topics: War

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature, Books

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.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Civilization

‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Churches, Religion

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.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Art

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers

All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing; yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Knowledge, Despair

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Perception, Simplicity

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Originality

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Ideas

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists

If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
Ezra Pound

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Part of The Whole, Reading, Books

I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim… lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Birth

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
Ezra Pound

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Books

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

One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. 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
Topics: Hope

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Religion, Churches

All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound
Topics: City Life, Cities

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.
Ezra Pound

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
Topics: Music

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief

Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature

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