A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
Ezra Pound

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
Ezra Pound

All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
Ezra Pound

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.
Ezra Pound

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Ezra Pound


Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
Ezra Pound

Either move or be moved.
Ezra Pound

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound

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.
Ezra Pound

Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
Ezra Pound

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

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Ezra Pound

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.
Ezra Pound

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
Ezra Pound