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
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.
America is a lunatic asylum.
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
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.
You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.
It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, until they have seen and lived at least part of their contents
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.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.