Literary Birthday - Ezra Pound, 30 October

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound, born 30 October 1885, died 1 November 1972

Five Ezra Pound Quotes

1. Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. 
2. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. 
3. 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.
4. In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries. 
5. 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 one of modern poetry’s most important contributors. 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.

He worked in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines. Pound 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 serialization of Joyce’s Ulysses. 

From Writers Write