Quotes about Ezra Pound

Charles Bukowski

The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.

Anne Waldman

When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things . Not to invalidate your experience or all the great feelings you have, I tell them. Although poetry may be good for you, it's not therapy. You're making something with words which are visceral, muscular, active, not just markers of how you feel. And we have classes studying William Blake, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Stein.

Robert Morgan

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

Ernest Hemingway

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there.

The incredibly talented poet, Ezra Pound, was an active Fascist who not only supported Hitler and Mussolini but during WWII lived in Italy and made of 100 propaganda broadcasts on Radio Roe for the Axis. At the end of the war, we was arrested in Italy, brought back to the U. S. where he was tried for Treason for which he could have been executed. His attorney, claimed that he was insane and the court agreed placing him in St, Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital until he was healthy enough to stand trial. Many of the great American writers sought to free him. Most shared the view Hemmingway expressed I this quotation. After 12 years in the Mental Hospital, he was released and not prosecuted as a result of the lobbying of so any great literati—even patriots like Hemmingway.

Howard Nemerov

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

Howard Fast

Like a foul fistula, overloaded with pus, this corruption exploded in the presentation of the Bollingen-Library of Congress award to the fascist poet, Ezra Pound.

Pound, 1885-1972, was a remarkably talented poet who also happened to be mentally ill and was also an ardent Fascist. However, his politics were embedded throughout his creative works, especially his support of Italian Fascist Dictator Mussolini while living in Italy and his attacks on FDR. When he received an award sponsored by the Library of Congress many people were outraged. Few expressed that outrage as eloquently as Fast.

William T. Vollmann

I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.'

W. S. Merwin

He said you should write about 75 lines every day. You know, Pound was a great one for laying down the law about how you did anything.

Pete Hamill

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.

Sally Mann

I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it.

Laura Riding

When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation. Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.

Ezra Pound Quotes