1885-1972, American Poet, Critic
'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.
Ezra Pound – [Self-knowledge]
'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!
Ezra Pound – [Fame]
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound – [Civilization]
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
Ezra Pound – [Books: Classics]
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound – [Translation]
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.
Ezra Pound – [Jesus Christ]
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound – [Genius]
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
Ezra Pound – [Freedom]
All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound – [Cities and City Life]
All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
Ezra Pound – [Despair]
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound – [Generalizations]
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
Ezra Pound – [Passion]
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
Ezra Pound – [Fascism]
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Ezra Pound – [Arts and Artists]
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 – [Scholars and Scholarship]
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 – [Arts and Artists]
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound – [Writers and Writing]
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound – [Literature]
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Ezra Pound – [Arts and Artists]
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Ezra Pound – [Critics and Criticism]