Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972
Place of birth: Hailey, Idaho Territory, United States
Most famous book: The Cantos
Interesting facts:
- He was arrested as a traitor in 1945 for supporting Mussolini and Hitler, as well as taking part in an anti-American campaign
- He spent 12 years in a psychiatric hospital
- A major representative of Imagism and the early modernist movement
- Pound became involved with fellow poet Hilda “H. D.” Doolittle, and twice asked for her hand in marriage, though rejected
21 Beautiful Ezra Pound Quotes:
1.”Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”
2.”Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence .”
3.”If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.”
4.”Literature is news that STAYS news.”
5.”The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity. ”
6.”AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he ‘is a bad linguist’ or that he or she can’t possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN. ”
7.”Either move or be moved.”
8.”A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”
9.”I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.”
10.”No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”
11.”When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”
12.”The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.”
13.”I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”
14.”Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.”
15.”In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”
16.”The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.”
17.”Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.”
18.”Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”
19.”Genius… is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.”
20.”Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. ”
21.”My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.”
