Quotes from Ezra Pound

The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Every great change is simple.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.