The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
EZRA POUNDLiterature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
More Ezra Pound Quotes
-
-
The only history that matters is the history we know.
EZRA POUND -
A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
EZRA POUND -
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
EZRA POUND -
Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.
EZRA POUND -
Genius, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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 -
In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
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 -
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
EZRA POUND -
Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
EZRA POUND -
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
EZRA POUND -
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
EZRA POUND -
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.
EZRA POUND -
The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
EZRA POUND -
The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
EZRA POUND -
Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.
EZRA POUND -
Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
EZRA POUND -
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
EZRA POUND -
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
EZRA POUND -
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
EZRA POUND -
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
EZRA POUND -
The artist is always beginning.
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 -
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
EZRA POUND -
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
EZRA POUND -
If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.
EZRA POUND