Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)
American expatriate poet, musician and critic who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early to mid-20th century poetry.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work.
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.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.
But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.
Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello."
"You damn sadist!" said mr. cummings,
"you try to make people think."
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. ONLY what has been written AGAINST the market.
Literature is news that STAYS news.
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