Quote

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.

Ezra Pound

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ezra Pound
Age: 87 †
Born: 1885
Born: October 30
Died: 1972
Died: November 1
Autobiographer
Composer
Economist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Radio Personality
Translator
Writer
Hailey
Idaho
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound
Artist
Violent
Shows
Artists
Doe
Whose
Uninteresting
Live
Violence
Idolatry
Must
Modern
Strife
Work
Called
Craft
Literature
Crafts
Show
Gods

More quotes by Ezra Pound

Image
That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.
Ezra Pound
Image
Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.
Ezra Pound
Image
The artist is the antenna of the race.
Ezra Pound
Image
Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
Ezra Pound
Image
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
Image
Rhythm must have meaning.
Ezra Pound
Image
Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
Ezra Pound
Image
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.
Ezra Pound
Image
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom
Ezra Pound
Image
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
Ezra Pound
Image
See, they return ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.
Ezra Pound
Image
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
Ezra Pound
Image
The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
Ezra Pound
Image
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Ezra Pound
Image
The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
Ezra Pound
Image
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Ezra Pound
Image
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.
Ezra Pound
Image
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth to disentangle promise from achievement to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
Ezra Pound
Image
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
Ezra Pound
Image
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
Ezra Pound