Ezra Pound Quotes

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

Great poets seldom make bricks without straw. They pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries and then set their own inimitable light atop the mountain.

The true poet is most easily distinguished from the false when he trusts himself to the simplest expression and writes without adjectives.

The great writer is always the plodder.

Some poems have form as a tree has form and some as water poured into a vase.

All America is an insane asylum.

A dirty book worth reading.

Art very possibly ought to be the supreme achievement, the ‘accomplished’, but there is the other satisfactory effect-that of a man hurling himself at an indomitable chaos and yanking and hauling as much of it as possible into some sort of order (or beauty) aware of it both as chaos and as potential.

How did it go in the madhouse? Rather badly. But what other place could one live in America?

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.

Tching prayed on the mountain and wrote make it new on his bath tub. Day by day make it new cut underbrush, pile the logs keep it growing.

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun, Half black half white Nor knowst’ou wing from tail  Pull down thy vanity.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace.

What thou lovest well remains, The rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

To the beat of the measure From star-up to the half-dark From half-dark to half-dark Unceasing the measure.

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