Ezra Pound: Trending quotes

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Ezra Pound: 136 quotes18 likes

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

“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”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos
Source: The Pisan Cantos

“Glance is the enemy of vision.”

“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.”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

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

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

Ezra Pound The Cantos

Canto XCVII
Source: 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

Source: ABC of Reading

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

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

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

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.

“small talk comes from small bones”

“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”

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

“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.”

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

“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...”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

Canto LXXXI
The Cantos