Ezra Pound Quotes

Biography: Ezra Pound is known for being a pioneering modernist poet and influent... more Biography: Ezra Pound is known for being a pioneering modernist poet and influential literary figure. Born in 1885 in Idaho, Pound played a crucial role in developing the early 20th-century poetry movements, including Imagism and Vorticism. His work and mentorship profoundly impacted contemporaries like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. less

"I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irrevocably cynical.""The act of being an artist is not easy and self-discipline is necessary.""And the days are not full enough and the nights are not full enough and life slips by like a field mouse.""Good writers are those who keep the language efficient.""A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules or fits certain definitions.""One measure of genius is the ability to see alternatives.""Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.""A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.""All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing. Yes, I think it was the happiest day of my life.""As a poet, I should like to say that my only argument is with those who do not interest me, and that I can have no quarrel with those who do.""Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.""With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.""The worst mistake you can make is the one you do not learn from.""Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.""The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.""Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.""Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.""A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.""Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions.""Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."

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