Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
“And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.”
“Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.”
“small talk comes from small bones”
“Glance is the enemy of vision.”
“All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.”
“Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection—/in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria”
“The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.”
“The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.”
“Rhythm must have meaning.”
“Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.”
“yr/ humanity counterfeityr/ liberty cankered with simulation”
“Man reading ought to be a man intensely alive. The book ought to be a ball of light in his hands. ”
“My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.”
“Literature is news that stays news.”
“A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.”
“Your interest is in the bloody loam but what I'm after is the finished product.”
“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.”
“The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”
“Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.”
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.”
“And the days are not full enoughAnd the nights are not full enoughAnd life slips by like a field mouseNot shaking the grass”
“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”