Quotes from Ezra Pound

Literature is news that stays news.

If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Either move or be moved.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

...poetry is not greatly concerned with what a man thinks, but with what is so imbedded in his nature that it never occurs to him to question it: not a matter of which idea he holds, but of the depth at which he holds it.

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

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.

Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

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.