Quotes by Ezra Pound

About Ezra Pound:

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate US poet and critic who was a major figure in the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–69).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.

Ezra Pound

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Ezra Pound

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Ezra Pound

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.

Ezra Pound

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Ezra Pound

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.

Ezra Pound

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

Ezra Pound

Literature is news that stays news.

Ezra Pound

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or ...

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.

Ezra Pound

I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seem To mock me now, all night, all night, and Have I strayed among the cliffs here They say, some day I'll fall Down through the sea-bit fissures, and no more Know the warm cloak of sun, or bathe The dew acr...

Ezra Pound

We claim no glory. If the tempest rolls About us we have fear, and then Having so small a stake grow bold again. We know not definitely even this But 'cause some vague half knowing half doth miss Our consciousness and leaves us feeling That somehow a...

Ezra Pound

Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

Ezra Pound

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.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Ezra Pound

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Ezra Pound

Author Bio

  • NameEzra Pound
  • DescriptionAmerican Imagist poet and critic
  • AliasesEzra Weston Loomis Pound
  • BornOctober 30, 1885
  • DiedNovember 1, 1972
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Literary Critic; Composer; Translator; Autobiographer; Writer
  • AwardsBollingen Prize