Ezra Pound

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello."

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles.

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Literature is language charged with meaning.

And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.

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;