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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

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
Never
Popular
Pages
Reader
Slack
Secret
Habitually
Attention
Lap
Common
Whatsoever
Given
Strain
Writing
Page

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No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.
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A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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What counts is the cultural level
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Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.
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It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
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The natural object is always the adequate symbol.
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The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
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Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
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Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
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Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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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.
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In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.
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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
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A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
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The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
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