This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.
Oh, say, how call ye this, To face, and smile, the comrade whom his kiss Betrayed? Scorn? Insult? Courage? None of these: 'tis but of all man's inward sicknesses the vilest, that he knoweth not of shame nor pity! Yet I praise him that he came . . . to me it shall bring comfort, once to clear my heart on thee, and thou shalt wince to hear.
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis 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.
Poetry |
It is not possible to enter into the nature of the Good by standing aloof from it — by merely speculating upon it. Act the Good, and you will believe in it. Throw yourself into the stream of the world's good tendency and you will feel the force of the current and the direction in which it is setting. The conviction that the world is moving toward great ends of progress will come surely to him who is himself engaged in the work of progress.
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
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.
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
No one knows, at sight a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, there's nothing in it. Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me: Don't kick against the pricks, accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game and died, there's nothing in it.
Convention | Good | Poetry |
Revenge a hundred years old has still its milk-teeth.