Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972), poet and critic.

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."
- Ezra Pound

"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
- Ezra Pound

"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."
- Ezra Pound

"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. "
- Ezra Pound

"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."
- Ezra Pound

"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."
- Ezra Pound

"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."
- Ezra Pound

"When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder."
- Ezra Pound

Pound image source (1)