Ezra Pound Quotes About Literature
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I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
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The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, 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.
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Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
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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.
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Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
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Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
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Literature is news that stays news.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
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Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
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I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
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Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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