Ezra Pound Quotes

“Rhythm must have meaning.”
― Ezra Pound

“Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire.”
― Ezra Pound

“Of course when one opens a coffin, one destroys it. Nevertheless a delicate odour of cedarwood will come forth.”
― Miguel Serrano, The Visits of the Queen of Sheba

“I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.
They should all be freed.
It is long since I was a herdsman.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another.

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches.
The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
Post-Graduate Student: “That’s only a sun-fish”
Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.”
After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichterinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay.
Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of the three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

— ABC of Reading (1934; New Directions)”
― Ezra Pound

“The mind's well-being was the well that was poisoned. One doesn't own a little anti-Semitism as if it were a puppy that isn't big enough yet to poop a lot. One yap from the pooch is already too much. Nor is saying "it was only social" a successful excuse. Only social, indeed ... only a mild case. The mild climate renders shirt-sleeves acceptable, loosens ties and collars, allows extremes to seem means, makes nakedness normal, facilitates the growth of weeds. Since the true causes of anti-Semitism do not lie with the Jews themselves (for if they did, anti-Semitism might bear some semblance of reason), they must lie elsewhere--so, if not in the hated, then in the hater, in another mode of misery.

Rationalist philosophers, from the beginning, regarded ignorance and error as the central sources of evil, and the conditions of contemporary life have certainly given their view considerable support. We are as responsible for our beliefs as for our behavior. Indeed, they are usually linked. Our brains respond, as well as our bodies do, to exercise and good diet. One can think of hundreds of beliefs--religious, political, social--which must be as bad for the head as fat is for the heart, and whose loss would lighten and enliven the spirit; but inherently silly ones, like transubstantiation, nowadays keep their consequences in control and relatively close to home. However, anti-Semitism does not; it is an unmitigated moral catastrophe. One can easily imagine how it might contaminate other areas of one's mental system. But is it the sickness or a symptom of a different disease? Humphrey Carpenter's level headed tone does not countenance Pound's corruption. It simply places the problem before us, permitting out anger and our pity.
-- From "Ezra Pound”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“I did Barbie’s dream as a one-off thing, but I found it haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York.
Still, that would’ve been the end of it...except, by a wild coincidence, a short time later I received a postcard from Jonathan Carroll. He wrote that he’d been following my graphic novel Signal to Noise—which was being serialized in The Face magazine at the time—and he was finding a number of very scary similarities between my story and his as yet unpublished novel, A Child Across the Sky. He concluded, “We’re like two radio sets tuned to the same goofy channel.”
I wrote back and said, “I think you’re right. What’s more, I abandoned a whole storyline after reading Bones of the Moon, but I keep thinking I ought to return to it.” Jonathan then sent me a wonderful letter with this advice: “Go to it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written. The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story.” With that encouragement, I began creating A Game of You.”
― Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion

“Every civil war builds on illusions and fear
Even war between individuals; whatever bonds may exist between them

To recapitulate images from history: After the first
world war, exhaustion, victory, inability to
build a new order, growing dissolution, chaos Revanchism Economic depression Then the waiting
for Germany, the generalized war initiated by Germany
This dread waiting, 1938, 1939 When I was conceived
After the cold war another period of exhaustion, another victory Perhaps we are in the presence of generalized
civil war, internal division, hatred Should we prefer
the empire? As Dante did? Or Ezra Pound, Heidegger Or
for that matter Brecht? We love dissolution and chaos passionately,
I hear a voice say, I know whose It is not here that I shall say it
It is not easy There are no nations Pillars of fire precede
the returning, in human terms, lost son.”
― Göran Sonnevi, Mozart's Third Brain

“But his sophistication is still juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious; when he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much simpler than himself, he reveals the callowness of the hunter by the pettiness of the game he pursues.”
― Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties