Ezra Pound: Thing

Ezra Pound was American Imagist poet and critic. Explore interesting quotes on thing.

Ezra Pound: 136 quotes17 likes

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

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

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”

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

“But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.”

Guide to Kulchur (1938), p. 60

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

Source: Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), Ch. 23