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
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
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.
No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Literature is news that stays news.
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.
The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.