The public will buy a certain amount of poetry if you give them their striptease.” – Ezra Pound.
Let the gods speak softly of us.
More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.
The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention – and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.
You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don’t like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good tastes if you haven’t naturally got it.
Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be ‘in on it’.
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities –.
But I am like the grass, I can not love you.
And if you ask how I regret that parting: It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end Confused, whirled in a tangle. What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart. I.
Yea, and the little earth crumbles beneath our feet and we endure.
You have to hammer yourself into an artist.
And I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts.
I have weathered the storm, I have beaten out my exile.
There is something so degrading – at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade – that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, “he does too much.
Separation on the River Kiang KO-JIN goes west from Ko-kaku-ro, The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river. His lone sail blots the far sky. And now I see only the river, The long Kiang, reaching heaven. Taking.
Make-strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.
The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
Under white clouds, cielo di Pisa. Out of all this beauty something must come.
We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.