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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.

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
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Hailey
Idaho
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound
Poetry
Arbitrary
Pure
Conventional
Sound
Bound
Art
Symbols
Complexes
Complex
Bounds
Poet

More quotes by Ezra Pound

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It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
Ezra Pound
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Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound
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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
Ezra Pound
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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
Ezra Pound
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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
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Glance is the enemy of vision.
Ezra Pound
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All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
Ezra Pound
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Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
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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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
Ezra Pound
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When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
Ezra Pound
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
Ezra Pound
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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.
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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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
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You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.
Ezra Pound
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Properly, we should read for power.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Ezra Pound
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Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound