Ezra Pound Quotes

“Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”

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

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), Ch. 8

“When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.”

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

“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.”

As quoted after his arrest for treason; see Treason: the story of disloyalty and betrayal in American history http://books.google.com/books?id=lXZKAAAAMAAJ&q=%E2%80%9CIf+a+man+isn%27t+willing+to+take+some+risk+for+his+opinions,+either+his+opinions+are+no+good+or+he%27s+no+good%E2%80%9D&dq=%E2%80%9CIf+a+man+isn%27t+willing+to+take+some+risk+for+his+opinions,+either+his+opinions+are+no+good+or+he%27s+no+good%E2%80%9D&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RgacUteRAZDYoATC1IDYCg&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAjgU by Nathaniel Weyl (1950), p. 400

Ezra Pound Quotes about books

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

Source: ABC of Reading

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”

Guide to Kulchur (1938), p. 55
Variant: Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.

“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”

“It has been complained, with some justice, that I dump my note-books on the public.”

“Literature is news that STAYS news.”

A Retrospect (1918)

Ezra Pound: Trending quotes

“Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), Ch. 2 (p. 29 in the 1961 paperback)

“My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.”

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), p. 25

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.”

A dinner table conversation quoted in Composed on the tongue, "Encounters will Ezra Pound" by Allen Ginsberg

Ezra Pound Quotes

“If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him”

“Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.”

Canto XIII
The Cantos
Context: 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.

“Without character you will
be unable to play on that instrument”

'Lament of the Frontier Guard' (From Cathay, 1915)

“How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity
[... ]
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity”

Canto XIII
The Cantos

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

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos

“I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.”

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

“Rhythmhave meaning.”

“With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

“What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage”

“Glance is the enemy of vision.”

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos
Source: The Pisan Cantos

“A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.”

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

“The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”

“I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak.
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.”

“The temple is holy because it is not for sale.”

Canto CXX (the concluding Canto of the 1975 edition of The Cantos')
The Cantos

“The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.”

Canto XCVII
Source: The Cantos

“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.”

“The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”

“I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.”

“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient.”

“small talk comes from small bones”

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), Chapter 3
Context: Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

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

“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”

“Both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it.”

Axiomata (1921). Quoted in Witemeyer, Hugh (1951), The Poetry of Ezra Pound, University of California Press, p. 26

“To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered...”

"The Tradition", in Poetry, ed. by Harriet Monroe, III, 3 (Dec. 1913), p. 137; reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1968), p. 91.

“And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean, for things they didn't know,
But that time seems to be passing.”

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos

“One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.”

Canto XIII
The Cantos

“Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,
The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,
Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms
Wart of the common-weal,
Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things
Darkness the defiler
Twin evil of envy,
Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things
Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos,
neschek, the crawling evil,
slime, the corrupter of all things,
Poisoner of the fount,
of all fountains, neschek,
The serpent, evil against Nature's increase,
Against beauty”

"Affirmations: As for Imagism", The New Age, January 1915

“The art of letters will come to an end before A. D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.”

Addendum for C
neschek is a transliteration of the Hebrew "נֶשֶׁך" meaning "usury"
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

“The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”

Quoted in A Serious Character (1988) by Humphrey Carpenter

“Many errors,
a little rightness.”

Canto XIII
The Cantos

“Pride, jealousy and possessiveness
3 pains of hell”

Canto CXVI
The Cantos

“Poetry must be as well written as prose.”

Canto CXIII
The Cantos

“A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures”

Letter to Harriet Monroe (January 1915)

“And for one beautiful day there was peace.”

Addendum for C
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

“I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America and all America is an insane asylum.”

Notes for CXVII et seq
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

“The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.”

When asked by the press when he had been released from the mental hospital; apparently from an interview in Naples after emigrating back to Italy after WW2, this is his most notorious quotation, though he didn't write it down.[citation needed]

“All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.”

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), p. 33

“AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.”

Addendum for C
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

“Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.”

Source: ABC of Reading (1934), p. 42

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”

Instigations of Ezra Pound (1920), p. 109

Ezra Pound book The Spirit of Romance

The Spirit of Romance (1910), p. 5

“Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place”

“With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
[…]
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
[…]
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly”

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos

“Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello."”

Canto XLV
Regarding usura, in 1972 Pound wrote in the foreword to "Selected Prose, 1909-1965":
<blockquote>"re USURY
I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause.
The cause is AVARICE."</blockquote>
The Cantos

“Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

From Draft of XXX Cantos (1933), No.2

“The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”

"Poetry: A Few Don'ts by an Imagist", Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (March 1913)

“It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work.”

Preface
ABC of Reading (1934)