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
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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.
A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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.