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
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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.
The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.