Ezra Pound quotes

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. – Ezra Pound

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. – Ezra Pound

The most accurate and effective weapon is a well-constructed sentence. – Ezra Pound

Literature is news that STAYS news. – Ezra Pound

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. – Ezra Pound

Make it new! – Ezra Pound

The worst error of the poet is that he gives his readers an occasion for laughter instead of an occasion for thought. – Ezra Pound

The poem must be a little machine made of words. – Ezra Pound

Real poetry is a criticism of life, thoughts, and emotions in their realest, sparest, and most teachable form. – Ezra Pound

If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. – Ezra Pound

VERSE is not written, it is re-written. – Ezra Pound

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. – Ezra Pound

The paid totalitarians dislike individualism and are very fond of order. It seems all quite proper. Order and the masses of humans are very little if at all responsible or responsible alone for the over-wise or weak rules. – Ezra Pound

Make it new! – Ezra Pound

Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. – Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound quotes part 2

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. – Ezra Pound

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

The inform’d artist (poet) is trebly armed. – Ezra Pound

It ought to be easy, ought to be possible, to indicate the difference between an imitation with no vital impulse in it (a play written for cash, money, per centage, box office) and a play springing from the life of a people. – Ezra Pound

The artist is the antennae of the race. – Ezra Pound

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work. – Ezra Pound

Do not Schiffley the classics. – Ezra Pound

Always, always Poetry is the intensity of emotion expressed through a work of art. – Ezra Pound

Ethics is a real thing. For example, if a man were to take your sister and write sonnets to her you would kill him at sight. That is a real thing. What is not a real thing is the pink panties. – Ezra Pound

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before finding even his own, salvation. – Ezra Pound

Go for the impossible, because the only thing possible is the obvious. – Ezra Pound

Poetic genius is born, not paid. – Ezra Pound

Avoid foolish colleges. – Ezra Pound

But poets are a separate matter. Many a one has lost his wits and gone fcrazy. Men in the arts have to destroy the so-called reality and create from elsewhere, are always destroying. They create again and again out of the void, they build. – Ezra Pound

The mind is short of answers. There ought to be two way questions or indefinitely continuing compliments instead of arbitrary rites, and their businesses. Stick to it again, plus Bewick. – Ezra Pound

We do not really need to know much more of Blake than this. He formulated for the first time a civilized code of accusation and organized its use. No more hungryness. – Ezra Pound

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but his reaction to it. – Ezra Pound

Reading makes all men equal, even when they are given nothing. – Ezra Pound

I believe that the state represents violence in a concentrated, organized form. – Ezra Pound

Build yourself a mouthpiece for whatever little you have of refined and delicate. – Ezra Pound

The slang of the colleges is a corpse in mummification. – Ezra Pound

The dream is more than the shadow and it ought always to be so. – Ezra Pound

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as a whole have a responsibility to their readers and society as a whole. – Ezra Pound

There aren’t many really novel clauses in this oldest of systems – Ezra Pound

There are only two things that can follow us into the next life: our deeds and our words. Our words are more powerful. – Ezra Pound

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. – Ezra Pound

Universities are of no importance. They stay in dormitories. You cannot possibly explain it to the honest working man. – Ezra Pound

The arts put man at variance to his own material environment. The arts are a mechanism of war against suicide and subordination. – Ezra Pound

I despair of an art which thinks the brick walls of a city street will not steel when trod by the pedestrian. – Ezra Pound

Even this, to such a government as that of the present stifler of so much of real literature in the interest of prettsillation; that is putting a red blouse on the postman. – Ezra Pound

Individuality is sacred. – Ezra Pound

A man in painting ought to advance his craft if ever so little. Volume of subject does not matter much. It does not exalt the song or the caper. There is not much honesty about many writers. – Ezra Pound

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning 5 or 6 times. – Ezra Pound

Sane men know that poets constantly lie. – Ezra Pound

Art can be defined as a phenomenon whereby something outside of ourselves becomes a part of ourselves. – Ezra Pound