Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Poundwas an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes, Hugh Selwyn Mauberleyand the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 October 1885
CityHailey, ID
CountryUnited States of America
America is a lunatic asylum.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
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.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
Wars are made to make debt.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
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.
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.