Words Like Spitting Fire

EZRA POUND 

1930: World's greatest poet

1945: Declared insane, put in an asylum

He was finally released in 1958.

Here are 10 thoughts from a poet who paid a heavy price for being a dissident:

1. Why Ancient Rome Fell. Rome fell as its language fell. 

Pound: 

"Rome rose with the idiom of Caesar, Ovid, and Tacitus, she declined in a welter of rhetoric, the diplomat's language to conceal thought...Rome went because it was no longer the fashion to hit the nail on the head."

2. On putting your skin in the game: 

"If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good." In the preface to Guide To Kulchur, Pound notes that he will be committing himself to ideas that “very few men can AFFORD to.”

3. Pound on words. Every word comes with "roots" and "associations" - with a history of where the word is "familiarly used" and also where it has been used "brilliantly or memorably." A great writer uses words with full awareness of this background.

4. Pound on how to lose an empire: 

"A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself." Vague words betray a mind that is afraid of conclusions. You lose power over reality by first losing your conceptual grip.

5. The greatest of art foists "sudden growth" upon us. Great art helps us grasp a complicated emotion or idea in a flash via the means of an elegant "image." The sensation of "sudden liberation" that accompanies great art comes from this image.

6. An apt definition of great literature from Pound:  

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." Bad writing is when the words are weak, the sentences meandering, and the paragraphs unsure of their own conclusion.

7. Pound against relativism: 

"When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish." GK Chesterton agrees: "Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer."

8. Pound on how to design your reading list: 

"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." We read for entertainment, distraction, solace - but why not read for power?

9. Ezra Pound on why he discarded rhyme: 

"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."

10. Pound on why literature is hero-worship: 

"The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity. The omniscient historian would display the masterpieces, their causes and their inter-relation. The study of literature is hero-worship."

TAKEN FROM: The Old Books Guy