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We Live In An Age Of Science And Of Abundance. The Care And Reverence For Books As Such, Proper To An Age When No Book Was Duplicated Until Someone Took The Pains To Copy It Out By Hand, Is Obviously No Longer Suited To ’the Needs Of Society’, Or To The Conservation Of Learning. The Weeder Is Supremely Needed If The Garden Of The Muses Is To Persist As A Garden.

-Ezra Pound

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We Live In An

Ezra Pound

...

We Live In An Age Of Science And Of Abundance. The Care And Reverence For Books As Such, Proper To An Age When No Book Was Duplicated Until Someone Took The Pains To Copy It Out By Hand, Is Obviously No Longer Suited To ’the Needs Of Society’, Or To The Conservation Of Learning. The Weeder Is Supremely Needed If The Garden Of The Muses Is To Persist As A Garden.

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Wars In Old Times Were Made To Get Slaves. The Modern Implement Of Imposing Slavery Is Debt.

Sovereignty Inheres In The Right To Issue Money. And The American Sovereignty Belongs By Right To The People, And Their Representatives In Congress Have The Right To Issue Money And To Determine The Value Thereof. And 120 Million, 120 Million Suckers Have Lamentably Failed To Insist On The Observation Of This Quite Decided Law. ... Now The Point At Which Embezzlement Of The Nation's Funds On The Part Of Her Officers Becomes Treason Can Probably Be Decided Only By Jurists, And Not By Hand-picked Judges Who Support Illegality.

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.

The Technique Of Infamy Is To Start Two Lies At Once And Get People Arguing Heatedly Over Which Is The Truth.

Man Is An Over-complicated Organism. If He Is Doomed To Extinction He Will Die Out For Want Of Simplicity.

I Would Hold The Rosy, Slender Fingers Of The Dawn For You.

The Primary Pigment Of Poetry Is The Image.

The Man Of Understanding Can No More Sit Quiet And Resigned While His Country Lets Its Literature Decay, And Lets Good Writing Meet With Contempt, Than A Good Doctor Could Sit Quiet And Contented While Some Ignorant Child Was Infecting Itself With Tuberculosis Under The Impression That It Was Merely Eating Jam Tarts.

The Image Is More Than An Idea. It Is A Vortex Or Cluster Of Fused Ideas And Is Endowed With Energy.

Presentation, Not Reference.

The Artist Is The Antenna Of The Race.

In Verse One Can Take Any Damn Constant One Likes, One Can Alliterate, Or Assone, Or Rhyme, Or Quant, Or Smack, Only One Must Leave The Other Elements Irregular.

Usura Slayeth The Child In The Womb It Stayeth The Young Man's Courting It Hath Brought Palsey To Bed, Lyeth Between The Young Bride And Her Bridegroom

What Thou Lov'st Well Is Thy True Heritage.

It Is Difficult To Write A Paradiso When All The Superficial Indications Are That You Ought To Write An Apocalypse.

No Teacher Has Ever Failed From Ignorance. That Is Empiric Professional Knowledge. Teachers Fail Because They Cannot `handle The Class.' Real Education Must Ultimately Be Limited To Men How Insist On Knowing, The Rest Is Mere Sheep-herding.

Take The Serious Side Of Disney, The Confucian Side Of Disney. It's In Having Taken An Ethoswhere You Have The Values Of Courage And Tenderness Asserted In A Way That Everybody Can Understand. You Have Got An Absolute Genius There. You Have Got A Greater Correlation Of Nature Than You Have Had Since The Time Of Alexander The Great.

In Case I Conk Out, This Is Provisionally What I Have To Do: I Must Clarify Obscurities; I Must Make Clearer Definite Ideas Or Dissociations. I Must Find A Verbal Formula To Combat The Rise Of Brutality--the Principle Of Order Versus The Split Atom.

Yet The Companions Of The Muses Will Keep Their Collective Nose In My Books And Weary With Historical Data, They Will Turn To My Dance Tune.

Great Literature Is Simply Language Charged With Meaning To The Utmost Possible Degree.

The Modern Artist Must Live By Craft And Violence. His Gods Are Violent Gods. Those Artists, So Called, Whose Work Does Not Show This Strife, Are Uninteresting.

No Good Poetry Is Ever Written In A Manner Twenty Years Old, For To Write In Such A Manner Shows Conclusively That The Writer Thinks From Books, Convention And Cliché, Not From Real Life.

Liberty Is Not A Right But A Duty.

And The Good Writer Chooses His Words For Their 'meaning', But That Meaning Is Not A A Set, Cut-off Thing Like The Move Of Knight Or Pawn On A Chess-board. It Comes Up With Roots, With Associations, With How And Where The Word Is Familiarly Used, Or Where It Has Been Used Brilliantly Or Memorably.

Art Is To Be Admired Rather Than Explained. The Jargon Of These Sculptors Is Beyond Me. I Do Not Precisely Know Why I Admire A Green Granite, Female, Apparently Pregnant Monster With One Eye Going Around A Square Corner.

A Great Age Of Literature Is Perhaps Always A Great Age Of Translations.

I Have Never Known Anyone Worth A Damn Who Wasn't Irascible.

The Thought Of What America Would Be Like If The Classics Had A Wide Circulation Troubles My Sleep (cantico Del Sole)

Your Mind And You Are Our Sargasso Sea.

As For Literature It Gives No Man A Sinecure. And No One Knows, At Sight, A Masterpiece. And Give Up Verse, My Boy, There's Nothing In It.

What Matters Is Not The Idea A Man Holds, But The Depth At Which He Holds It.

Learn Of The Green World What Can Be Thy Place In Scaled Invention Or True Artistry

Poetry Is A Language Pared Down To Its Essentials.

It Is Better To Present One Image In A Lifetime Than To Produce Voluminous Work. Image...that Which Presents An Intellectual And Emotional Complex In An Instant Of Time.

A Real Building Is One On Which The Eye Can Light And Stay Lit.

A General Loathing Of A Gang Or Sect Usually Has Some Sound Basis In Instinct.

A Man Of Genius Has A Right To Any Mode Of Expression.

The Difference Between A Gun And A Tree Is A Difference Of Tempo. The Tree Explodes Every Spring.

What Thou Lovest Well Remains, The Rest Is Dross What Thou Lov’st Well Shall Not Be Reft From Thee What Thou Lov’st Well Is Thy True Heritage

I Have Tried To Write Paradise Do Not Move Let The Wind Speak That Is Paradise. Let The Gods Forgive What I Have Made Let Those I Love Try To Forgive What I Have Made.

Rhythm Must Have Meaning.

And In The Mean Time My Songs Will Travel, And The Devirginated Young Ladies Will Enjoy Them When They Have Got Over The Strangeness

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.

America, My Country, Is Almost A Continent And Hardly Yet A Nation.

Don't Be Blinded By The Theorists And A Lying Press.

I Desired My Dust To Be Mingled With Yours Forever And Forever And Forever.

The Critic Who Doesn't Make A Personal Statement, In Remeasurements He Himself Has Made, Is Merely An Unreliable Critic. He Is Not A Measurer But A Repeater Of Other Men's Results. Krino, To Pick Out For Oneself, To Choose. That's What The Word Means.

No Picture Is Made To Endure Nor To Live With But It Is Made To Sell And Sell Quickly With Usura, Sin Against Nature, Is Thy Bread Ever More Of Stale Rags Is Thy Bread Dry As Paper.

A Man's Hope Measures His Civilization. The Attainability Of The Hope Measures, Or May Measure, The Civilization Of His Nation And Time.

Artists Are The Antennae Of The Race, But The Bullet-headed Many Will Never Learn To Trust The Great Artists.

Adolf Hitler Was A Jeanne D'arc, A Saint. He Was A Martyr. Like Many Martyrs, He Held Extreme Views.

Use No Superfluous Word, No Adjective, Which Does Not Reveal Something.

The Eyes Of This Dead Lady Speak To Me For Here Was Love, Was Not To Be Drowned Out. And Here Desire, Not To Be Kissed Away. The Eyes Of This Dead Lady Speak To Me.

From The Colour The Nature And By The Nature The Sign! Beatific Spirits Welding Together As In One Ash-tree In Ygdrasail.

Consider The Way Of The Scientists Rather Than The Way Of An Advertising Agent For A New Soap.

Good Writers Are Those Who Keep The Language Efficient. That Is To Say, Keep It Accurate, Keep It Clear.

The Individual Cannot Think And Communicate His Thought, The Governor And Legislator Cannot Act Effectively Or Frame His Laws Without Words, And The Solidity And Validity Of These Words Is In The Care Of The Damned And Despised Litterati...when Their Very Medium, The Very Essence Of Their Work, The Application Of Word To Thing Goes Rotten, I.e. Becomes Slushy And Inexact, Or Excessive Or Bloated, The Whole Machinery Of Social And Of Individual Thought And Order Goes To Pot.

Literature Does Not Exist In A Vacuum. Writers As Such Have A Definite Social Function Exactly Proportional To Their Ability As Writers. This Is Their Main Use.

Until You Know Who Has Lent What To Whom, You Know Nothing Whatever Of Politics, You Know Nothing Whatever Of History, You Know Nothing Of International Wrangles.

The Man Who Fears War And Squats Opposing My Words For Stour, Hath No Blood Of Crimson But Is Fit Only To Rot In Womanish Peace

I Guess The Definition Of A Lunatic Is A Man Surrounded By Them.

Every Great Change Is Simple.

That Text Is Known To Them That Have The Patience To Read It, Possibly One One-hundredth Of One Percent Of The Denizens. They Forget It, All Save A Few Western States. I Think Somebody In Dakota Once Read It. The Constitution.

The Worst Mistake I Made Was That Stupid, Suburban Prejudice Of Anti-semitism.

I Consider Criticism Merely A Preliminary Excitement, A Statement Of Things A Writer Has To Clear Up In His Own Head Sometime Or Other, Probably Antecedent To Writing; Of No Value Unless It Come To Fruit In The Created Work Later.

When Two Men In Business Always Agree, One Of Them Is Unnecessary.

Our Own Consciousness Is Incapable Of Having Produce The Universe. God, Therefore, Exists. That Is To Say, There Is No Reason For Not Applying The Term God, Theos, To The Intimate Essence

The Only Thing One Can Give An Artist Is Leisure In Which To Work. To Give An Artist Leisure Is Actually To Take Part In His Creation.

There Is Natural Ignorance And There Is Artificial Ignorance. I Should Say At The Present Moment The Artificial Ignorance Is About Eighty-five Per Cent.

Poetry Is A Very Complex Art.... It Is An Art Of Pure Sound Bound In Through An Art Of Arbitrary And Conventional Symbols.

To Say That A State Cannot Pursue Its Aims Because There Is No Money, Is Like Saying That An Engineer Cannot Build Roads, Because There Are No Kilometers.

Literature Is News That Stays News.

Utter Originality Is, Of Course, Out Of The Question.

Genius Is The Capacity To See Ten Things Where The Ordinary Man Sees One, And The Man Of Talent Sees Two Or Three, Plus The Ability To Register That Multiple Perception In The Material Of His Art.

The Flavors Of The Peach And The Apricot Are Not Lost From Generation To Generation. Neither Are They Transmitted By Book Learning.

Use No Superfluous Word, No Adjective, Which Does Not Reveal Something. Don't Use Such An Expression As 'dim Land Of Peace.' It Dulls The Image. It Mixes An Abstraction With The Concrete. It Comes From The Writer's Not Realizing That The Natural Object Is Always The Adequate Symbol. Go In Fear Of Abstraction.

The Flavors Of The Peach And The Apricot Are Not Lost From Generation To Generation, Neither Are They Transmitted By Book Learning. The Mystic Tradition, Any Mystic Tradition, Is Of A Similar Nature, That Is, It Is Dependent On Direct Perception, A 'knowledge' As Permanent As The Faculty For Receiving It.

Real Education Must Ultimately Be Limited To Men Who Insist On Knowing, The Rest Is Mere Sheep-herding.

There Is No Reason Why The Same Man Should Like The Same Books At Eighteen And At Forty-eight

The Sum Of Human Wisdom Is Not Contained In Any One Language.

Language Learning

I Should Consent To Breed Under Pressure, If I Were Convinced In Any Way Of The Reasonableness Of Reproducing The Species. But My Nerves And The Nerves Of Any Woman I Could Live With Three Months, Would Produce Only A Victim... Lacking In Impulse, A Mere Bundle Of Discriminations. If I Were Wealthy I Might Subsidize A Stud Of Young Peasants, Or A Tribal Group In Tahiti.

Mass Ought To Be In Latin, Unless You Could Do It In Greek Or Chinese. In Fact, Any Abracadabra That No Bloody Member Of The Public Or Half-educated Ape Of A Clargimint Could Think He Understood.

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.

Be Not Cheap Or Mediocre In Desiring.

A Crowd Pagan As Ever Imperial Rome Was, Eager, Careless, With An Animal Vigour Unlike That Of Any European Crowd That I Have Ever Looked At.

The Artist Is Always Beginning.

'tis The White Stag, Fame, We're A-hunting, Bid The World's Hounds Come To Horn!

The Phase Of The Usury System Which We Are Trying To Analyze Is More Or Less Patterson's Perception That The Bank Of England Could Have Benefit Of All The Interest On All The Money That It Creates Out Of Nothing. ... Now The American Citizen Can, Of Course, Appeal To His Constitution, Which States That Congress Shall Have Power To Coin Money Or Regulate The Value Thereof And Of Foreign Coin. Such Appeal Is Perhaps Quixotic.

Rhythm Is Form Cut Into Time.

It Is More Than Likely That The Brain Itself Is, In Origin And Development, Only A Sort Of Great Clot Of Genital Fluid Held In Suspense Or Reserved. This Hypothesis Would Explain The Enormous Content Of The Brain As A Maker Or Presenter Of Images.

Poets Who Are Not Interested In Music Are, Or Become, Bad Poets.

If The Individual, Or Heretic, Gets Hold Of Some Essential Truth, Or Sees Some Error In The System Being Practiced, He Commits So Many Marginal Errors Himself That He Is Worn Out Before He Can Establish His Point.

Gloom And Solemnity Are Entirely Out Of Place In Even The Most Rigorous Study Of An Art Originally Intended To Make Glad The Heart Of Man.

Compose In The Sequence Of The Musical Phrase, Not In Sequence Of A Metronome.

Properly, We Should Read For Power.

As A Bathtub Lined With White Porcelain, When The Hot Water Gives Out Or Goes Tepid, So Is The Slow Cooling Of Our Chivalrous Passion, O My Much Praised But-not-altogether-satisfactory Lady.

It Doesn't Matter Which Leg Of Your Table You Make First, So Long As The Table Has Four Legs And Will Stand Up Solidly When You Have Finished It.

Colloquial Poetry Is To The Real Art As The Barber's Wax Dummy Is To Sculpture.

A Little Light, Like A Rushlight / To Lead Back To Splendour.

If A Man Isn't Willing To Take Some Risk For His Opinions, Either His Opinions Are No Good Or He's No Good.

Use No Word That Under Stress Of Emotion You Could Not Actually Say.

What Matters Most Is Not The Idea, But The Capacity To Believe In It Completely.

In Our Time, The Curse Is Monetary Illiteracy, Just As Inability To Read Plain Print Was The Curse Of Earlier Centuries.

Somebody Said That I Am The Last American Living The Tragedy Of Europe.

I Did Not Enter Into Silence. Silence Captured Me.

A Civilized Man Is One Who Will Give A Serious Answer To A Serious Question. Civilization Itself Is A Certain Sane Balance Of Values.

The Ant's A Centaur In His Dragon World. Pull Down Thy Vanity, It Is Not Man Made Courage, Or Made Order, Or Made Grace, Pull Down Thy Vanity, I Say Pull Down. Learn Of The Green World What Can Be Thy Place In Scaled Invention Or True Artistry, Pull Down Thy Vanity, Paquin Pull Down! The Green Casque Has Outdone Your Elegance.

Good Art However 'immoral' Is Wholly A Thing Of Virtue. Good Art Can Not Be Immoral. By Good Art I Mean Art That Bears True Witness, I Mean The Art That Is Most Precise.

The History Of An Art Is The History Of Masterwork, Not Of Failures, Or Mediocrity.

Small Talk Comes From Small Bones

Where The Dead Walked And The Living Were Made Of Cardboard.

The Age Demanded An Image Of Its Accelerated Grimace, Something For The Modern Stage, Not, At Any Rate, An Attic Grace.

Song In The Manner Of Housman" O Woe, Woe, People Are Born And Die, We Also Shall Be Dead Pretty Soon Therefore Let Us Act As If We Were Dead Already. The Bird Sits On The Hawthorn Tree But He Dies Also, Presently. Some Lads Get Hung, And Some Get Shot. Woeful Is This Human Lot. Woe! Woe, Etcetera.... London Is A Woeful Place, Shropshire Is Much Pleasanter. Then Let Us Smile A Little Space Upon Fond Nature's Morbid Grace. Oh, Woe, Woe, Woe, Etcetera.

Haie! Haie! These Were The Swift To Harry; These The Keen-scented; These Were The Souls Of Blood. Slow On The Leash, Pallid The Leash-men!

What Thou Lovest Well Remains, The Rest Is Dross What Thou Lov'st Well Shall Not Be Reft From Thee What Thou Lov'st Well Is Thy True Heritage Whose World, Or Mine Or Theirs Or Is It Of None? First Came The Seen, Then Thus The Palpable Elysium, Though It Were In The Halls Of Hell. What Thou Lovest Well Is Thy True Heritage.

I Could I Trust Starve Like A Gentleman. It's Listed As Part Of The Poetic Training, You Know.

Go To The Adolescent Who Are Smothered In Family-- Oh How Hideous It Is To See Three Generations Of One House Gathered Together! It Is Like An Old Tree With Shoots, And With Some Branches Rotted And Falling.

I Found After Seventy Years That I Was Not A Lunatic But A Moron.... I Should Have Been Able To Do Better.

Christ Can Very Well Stand As An Heroic Figure. The Hero Need Not Be Of Wisdom All Compounded. Also He Is Not Wholly To Blame For The Religion That's Been Foisted On To Him.

The Ant's A Centaur In His Dragon World.

Nothing Written For Pay Is Worth Printing. Only What Has Been Written Against The Market.

Music Begins To Atrophy When It Departs Too Far From The Dance... Poetry Begins To Atrophy When It Gets Too Far From Music.

With Usura With Usura Hath No Man A House Of Good Stone Each Block Cut Smooth And Well Fitting.

The Intellect Is A Very Nice Whirligig Toy, But How People Take It Seriously Is More Than I Can Understand.

I Once Saw A Small Child Go To An Electric Light Switch As Say, Mamma, Can I Open The Light? She Was Using The Age-old Language Of Exploration, The Language Of Art.

Usury Is The Cancer Of The World, Which Only The Surgeon’s Knife Of Fascism Can Cut Out Of The Life Of The Nations.

Wars Are Made To Make Debt.

The Author's Conviction On This Day Of New Year Is That Music Begins To Atrophy When It Departs Too Far From The Dance; That Poetry Begins To Atrophy When It Gets Too Far From Music; But This Must Not Be Taken As Implying That All Good Music Is Dance Music Or All Poetry Lyric. Bach And Mozart Are Never Too Far From Physical Movement.

All My Life I Believed I Knew Something. But Then One Strange Day Came When I Realized That I Knew Nothing, Yes, I Knew Nothing. And So Words Became Void Of Meaning. I Have Arrived Too Late At Ultimate Uncertainty.

Quiet This Metal! Let The Manes Put Off Their Terror, Let Them Put Off Their Aqueous Bodies With Fire. Let Them Assume The Milk-white Bodies Of Agate. Let Them Draw Together The Bones Of The Metal.

The Real Trouble With War (modern War) Is That It Gives No One A Chance To Kill The Right People.

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.

Install Me In Any Profession Save This Damn'd Profession Of Writing, Where One Needs One's Brains All The Time.

No Verse Is Libre For The Man Who Wants To Do A Good Job.

And New York Is The Most Beautiful City In The World? It Is Not Far From It. No Urban Night Is Like The Night There... Squares After Squares Of Flame, Set Up And Cut Into The Aether. Here Is Our Poetry, For We Have Pulled Down The Stars To Our Will.

The Curse Of Me And My Nation Is That We Always Think Things Can Be Bettered By Immediate Action Of Some Sort, Any Sort Rather Than No Sort.

The Act Of Bell Ringing Is Symbolic Of All Proselytizing Religions. It Implies The Pointless Interference With The Quiet Of Other People.

Glance Is The Enemy Of Vision.

Discoveries Are Made By Gluttons And Addicts. The Man Who Forgets To Eat And Sleep Has An Appetite For Fact, For Interrelations Among Causes.

Fit For Kings, Formal Gardens Afford An Earthly Elysium And The Odd Impression That We Mere Men Might Actually Control Nature For A Time.

Technique Is The Test Of Sincerity.

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.

I Have Always Thought The Suicide Should Bump Off At Least One Swine Before Taking Off For Parts Unknown.

The Sum Of Human Wisdom Is Not Contained In Any One Language, And No Single Language Is Capable Of Expressing All Forms And Degrees Of Human Comprehension.

The Only Chance For Victory Over The Brainwash Is The Right Of Every Man To Have His Ideas Judged One At A Time. You Never Get Clarity As Long As You Have These Packaged Words, As Long As A Word Is Used By Twenty-five People In Twenty-five Different Ways. That Seems To Me To Be The First Fight, If There Is Going To Be Any Intellect Left.

The Book Shd. Be A Ball Of Light In One's Hand.

Humanity Is The Rich Effluvium, It Is The Waste And The Manure And The Soil, And From It Grows The Tree Of The Arts.

Bureaucrats Are A Pox. They Are Supposed To Be Necessary. Certain Chemicals In The Body Are Supposed To Be Necessary To Life, But Cause Death The Moment They Increase Beyond A Suitable Limit

One Discards Rhyme, Not Because One Is Incapable Of Rhyming Neat, Fleet, Sweet, Meet, Treat, Eat, Feet But Because There Are Certain Emotions Or Energies Which Are Nor Represented By The Over-familiar Devices Or Patterns.

All Great Art Is Born Of The Metropolis.

The Temple Is Holy Because It Is Not For Sale.

Fundamental Accuracy Of Statement Is The One Sole Morality Of Writing.

Religion I Have Defined As "another Of Those Numerous Failures Resulting From An Attempt To Popularize Art".

Genius... Is The Capacity To See Ten Things Where The Ordinary Man Sees One.

What Thou Lovest Well Remains.

But The One Thing You Should. Not Do Is To Suppose That When Something Is Wrong With The Arts, It Is Wrong With The Arts Only.

Here Is Our Poetry, For We Have Pulled Down The Stars To Our Will.

When Words Cease To Cling Close To Things, Kingdoms Fall, Empires Wane And Diminish.

The Secret Of Popular Writing Is Never To Put More On A Given Page Than The Common Reader Can Lap Off It With No Strain Whatsoever On His Habitually Slack Attention.

Better Mendacities Than The Classics In Paraphrase! Some Quick To Arm, Some For Adventure, Some From Fear Of Weakness, Some From Fear Of Censure, Some For Love Of Slaughter, In Imagination, Learning Later . . . Some In Fear, Learning Love Of Slaughter; Died Some, Pro Patria, Non "dulce" Non "et Decor" . Walked Eye-deep In Hell Believing In Old Men's Lies, The Unbelieving Came Home, Home To A Lie.

And The Days Are Not Full Enough And The Nights Are Not Full Enough And Life Slips By Like A Field Mouse Not Shaking The Grass

Any General Statement Is Like A Check Drawn On A Bank. Its Value Depends On What Is There To Meet It.

We Live In An Age Of Science And Of Abundance. The Care And Reverence For Books As Such, Proper To An Age When No Book Was Duplicated Until Someone Took The Pains To Copy It Out By Hand, Is Obviously No Longer Suited To ’the Needs Of Society’, Or To The Conservation Of Learning. The Weeder Is Supremely Needed If The Garden Of The Muses Is To Persist As A Garden.

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.

The Artist Is Always Beginning. Any Work Of Art Which Is Not A Beginning, An Invention, A Discovery Is Of Little Worth.

A People That Grows Accustomed To Sloppy Writing Is A People In The Process Of Losing Grip On Its Empire And On Itself.

The Garden En Robe De Parade. - Samain Like A Skein Of Loose Silk Blown Against A Wall She Walks By The Railing Of A Path In Kensington Gardens, And She Is Dying Piece-meal Of A Sort Of Emotional Anaemia. And Round About There Is A Rabble Of The Filthy, Sturdy, Unkillable Infants Of The Very Poor. They Shall Inherit The Earth. In Her Is The End Of Breeding. Her Boredom Is Exquisite And Excessive. She Would Like Some One To Speak To Her, And Is Almost Afraid That I Will Commit That Indiscretion.

To Break The Pentameter, That Was The First Heave

I Ask A Wreathwhich Will Not Crush My Head. And There Is No Hurry About It; I Shall Have, Doubtless, A Boom After My Funeral, Seeing That Long Standing Increases All Things Regardless Of Quality.

A Slave Is One Who Waits For Someone To Come And Free Him.

Almost Any Fool Can Paint An Academy Picture, And Any Imbecile Can Shoot Off A Kodak.

Science Is Unpoetic Only To Minds Jaundiced With Sentiment And Romanticism . . . The Great Masters Of The Past Boasted All They Could Of It And Found It Magical.

There Is No Topicmore Soporific And Generally Boring Than The Topic Of Ireland As Ireland, As A Nation.

If I Could Believe The Quakers Banned Music Because Church Music Is So Damn Bad, I Should View Them With Approval.

Democracy Is Now Currently Defined In Europe As A 'country Run By Jews,'

The Real Meditation Is ... The Meditation On One's Identity. Ah, Voilà Une Chose!! You Try It. You Try Finding Out Why You're You And Not Somebody Else. And Who In The Blazes Are You Anyhow? Ah, Voilà Une Chose!

The Apparition Of These Faces In The Crowd; Petals On A Wet Black Bough.

Seems Fairly Clear That You Fix A Breed By Limiting The Amount Of Alien Infiltration. You Make A Race By Homogeneity And By Avoiding Inbreeding.... No Argument Has Ever Been Sprouted Against It. You Like It In Dogs And Horses.

My Pawing Over The Ancients And Semi-ancients Has Been One Struggle To Find Out What Has Been Done, Once And For All, Better Than It Can Ever Be Done Again, And To Find Out What Remains For Us To Do, And Plenty Does Remain, For If We Still Feel The Same Emotions As Those Who Launched A Thousand Ships, It Is Quite Certain That We Came On These Feelings Differently, Through Different Nuances, By Different Intellectual Gradations. Each Age Has Its Own Abounding Gifts Yet Only Some Ages Transmute Them Into Matters Of Duration.

This Is No Book. Whoever Touches This Touches A Man.

With One Day's Reading A Man May Have The Key In His Hands.

Come, Let Us Pity Those Who Are Better Off Than We Are. Come, My Friend, And Remember That The Rich Have Butlers And No Friends, And We Have Friends And No Butlers. (excerpt From 'the Garrett')

Poetry Must Be As Well Written As Prose.

The Natural Object Is Always The Adequate Symbol.

There Are Few Things More Difficult Than To Appraise The Work Of A Man Suddenly Dead In His Youth; To Disentangle Promise From Achievement; To Save Him From That Sentimentalizing Which Confuses The Tragedy Of The Interruption With The Merit Of The Work Actually Performed.

What Counts Is The Cultural Level

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.

A Classic Is Classic Not Because It Conforms To Certain Structural Rules, Or Fits Certain Definitions It Is Classic Because Of A Certain Eternal And Irrepressible Freshness.

America Is A Lunatic Asylum.

Lunatic Asylums

If A Nation's Literature Declines, The Nation Atrophies And Decays.

It Would Be About As Easy For An American To Become A Chinaman Or A Hindoo As For Him To Acquire An Englishness Or A Frenchness Or A European-ness That Is More Than Half Skin Deep.

Any Damn Fool Can Be Spontaneous.

Objectivity And Again Objectivity, And Expression: No Hindside-before-ness, No Straddled Adjectives (as "addled Mosses Dank"), No Tennysonianness Of Speech; Nothing-nothing That You Couldn't, In Some Circumstance, In The Stress Of Some Emotion, Actually Say.

Pay No Attention To The Criticism Of Men Who Have Never Themselves Written A Notable Work.

'tis Not Need We Know Our Every Thought Or See The Work Shop Where Each Mask Is Wrought Wherefrom We View The World Of Box And Pit, Careless Of Wear, Just So The Mask Shall Fit And Serve Our Jape's Turn For A Night Or Two.

Poetry Is About As Much A 'criticism Of Life' As Red-hot Iron Is A Criticism Of Fire.

Technique Is The Test Of Sincerity. If A Thing Isn't Worth Getting The Technique To Say, It Is Of Inferior Value.

You Have Been Second Always. Tragical? No. You Preferred It To The Usual Thing: One Dull Man, Dulling And Uxorious, One Average Mind- With One Thought Less, Each Year.

The Rustling Of The Silk Is Discontinued, Dust Drifts Over The Courtyard, There Is Not Sound Of Footfall, And The Leaves Scurry Into Heaps And Lie Still, And She The Rejoicer Of The Heart Is Beneath Them: A Wet Leaf That Clings To The Threshold.

The What Is So Much More Important Than How.

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