Literary Birthday – 30 October – Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was born 30 October 1885, and died 1 November 1972.

Nine Ezra Pound Quotes

1. Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
2. 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.
3. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
4. 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.
5. Literature is language charged with meaning.
6. 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.
7. In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
8. Literature is news that stays news.
9. Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

Ezra Pound was an important expatriate American poet and critic. T. S. Eliot declared that Pound ‘is more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.’ Pound stressed clarity, precision and economy of language. A selection of his poems is available in The Cantos of Ezra Pound. He worked in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, where he supported the work of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the publication of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and for the serialisation of Joyce’s Ulysses. 

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ezra_Pound_passport_photograph_undated.jpg

Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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