Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Poet, Critic

Ezra Pound was a pivotal modernist poet known for his innovative ideas on language and art, particularly through his influential work 'The Cantos'.

Men Art Literature Writing Book Artist
Born
October 30, 1885
Died
April 1, 1972
Quotes
216
Rank
#168

Quote collection

Ezra Pound quotes (page 8 of 11)

216 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Ezra Pound Poet, Critic
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"The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic."

America Perception Trying
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"The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand."

Nice Intelligent People
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"A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at."

New York Animal Rome
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"I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion."

Mean Years America
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"where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard."

Made
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"My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration."

Struggle Feelings Intellectual
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"I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art."

Art Children Light
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"Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner."

Pregnancy Eye Squares
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"I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know."

Trust Gentleman Training
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"Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man."

Art Men Study
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"Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."

Technique Tests Sincerity
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"Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something."

Doe Adjectives Use
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"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."

International Knows
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"The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity."

Art Historical Mediocrity
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"Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry"

Art Green World Invention
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"Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say."

Stress Use Emotion
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"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great."

Taken Genius Way
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