Ezra Pound

"A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him."

"The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

"Literature is news that STAYS news."

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."

"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."

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."

"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."

"Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."

"Hence "the serious artist," whom Pound describes in an early essay as the maintainer of the mental health of the state, has concerns identical with the serious philosopher, the serious ruler, the serious editor or publisher, the serious teacher. He keeps up values."

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound."

"Personally I admire several writers (Céline, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency of a poet. I never listened to Pound’s broadcasts, but I often read them in the B.B.C. Monitoring Reports, and they were intellectually and morally disgusting. Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences."

"I have been very excited by Ezra Pound's work with Chinese. People don't realize how much of Chinese culture is part of American culture. I mean, all those transcendentalists at the beginning of American writing."

"A musician once asked Ezra Pound if there was anywhere one could get all of poetry, in the sense that one could get all of music in Bach. Pound's response was that if a person would take the trouble really to learn Greek, he could get all of it, or nearly all of it, in Homer."

"Worte sind Blätter, alte braune Blätter im Frühling, // Ins Unbekannte fliegen sie auf der Suche nach einem Lied."

"Regungslos war ich, Baum mitten im Wald // Und wusste die Wahrheit nie gesehener Dinge."

"...Ich sehne mich nach Menschen meines Schlags // Und Werktagsmenschen sprechen mich nicht an // Ja ich vergeh nach Menschen meiner Geistesart // Und habe niemand um mich außer Schatten ..."