Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
Meaning of the quote
This quote suggests that Ezra Pound, an American poet, felt he was the last American to truly understand and experience the difficulties and suffering happening in Europe. He seemed to feel a deep connection to the struggles of Europe, even though he was an American. Pound may have believed that most other Americans did not fully grasp or empathize with the tragedies unfolding across the Atlantic Ocean.
About Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was an influential American poet and critic who played a major role in the early modernist poetry movement. Despite his literary accomplishments, Pound’s life and legacy remain controversial due to his support for fascism and antisemitism during World War II.
More quotes from Ezra Pound
A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Either move or be moved.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Literature is news that stays news.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
All great art is born of the metropolis.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Genius… is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Wars are made to make debt.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take – choose the bolder.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)
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.
American poet and critic (1885-1972)