A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic. Egoist (London, Oct. 1917).)

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.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic. Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963).)

Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethos ... where 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.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic. Interview, Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963).)

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic. Quoted in Charles Olson and Ezra Pound, Catherine Seelye (1975). Said to poet and critic Charles Olson in 1945, when Olson visited Pound in Howard Hall, the institution for the criminally insane in which Pound was detained pending a judgment on his wartime broadcasts from Rome.)

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet. Ancient Music (l. 1-4). . . The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. (1957) New Directions.)

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet, critic. letter, Feb. 4, 1918, to the painter J.B. Yeats (father of W.B. Yeats). quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character, pt. 2, ch. 10 (1988).)

Oh we drunk his "Hale" in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o' men was he.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet. Ballad of the Goodly Fere (l. 13-16). . . The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. (1957) New Directions.)

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet. A Virginal (l. 9-10). . . The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. (1957) New Directions.)

What thou lovest well remains,

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet. Canto LXXXI (l. 131). . . The Cantos of Ezra Pound. (1970, repr. 1991) New Directions.)

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman?
I have detested you long enough.

(Ezra Pound (1885-1972), U.S. poet. A Pact (l. 1-2). . . The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. (1957) New Directions.)