Quotes from Ezra Pound

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

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

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

small talk comes from small bones

Man reading ought to be a man intensely alive. The book ought to be a ball of light in his hands.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

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.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr.

Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')

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

If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

Go in fear of abstractions.

The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.

The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention — and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.

Let the gods speak softly of us