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

Ezra Pound

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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
Mediocrity
Historical
History
Art
Failures

More quotes by Ezra Pound

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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
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
Ezra Pound
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We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
Ezra Pound
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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
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I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral, Seeing that long standing increases all things regardless of quality.
Ezra Pound
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A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
Ezra Pound
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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
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A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
Ezra Pound
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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
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
Ezra Pound
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Ezra Pound
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The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
Ezra Pound
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
Ezra Pound
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It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
Ezra Pound
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Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.
Ezra Pound
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USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound
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It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
Ezra Pound