Quotes from Ezra Pound

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good

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

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.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

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

There is no reason why the same man should like the same book at 18 and at 48.

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

The age demanded an imageOf its accelerated grimace,Something for the modern stage,Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

Winter is icumen in,Lhude sing Goddamm,Raineth drop and staineth slop,And how the wind doth ramm!Sing: Goddamm.

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

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is drossWhat thou lov'st well shall not be reft from theeWhat thou lov'st well is thy true heritageWhose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none?First came the seen, then thus the palpableElysium, though it were in the halls of hell.What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

Better mendacitiesThan the classics in paraphrase!

For three years, out of key with his time,He strove to resuscitate the dead artOf poetry; to maintain "the sublime"In the old sense. Wrong from the start—No, hardly, but seeing he had been bornIn a half savage country, out of date.

An epic is a poem including history.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.Pull down thy vanity, it is not manMade courage, or made order, or made grace,Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.Learn of the green world what can be thy placeIn scaled invention or true artistry,Pull down thy vanity,Paquin pull down!The green casque has outdone your elegance.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,He fished by obstinate isles.

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

There died a myriad,And of the best, among them,For an old bitch gone in the teeth,For a botched civilization.Charm, smiling at the good mouth,Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,For two gross of broken statues,For a few thousand battered books.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.