"Ezra Weston Loomis Pound" was an expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure of the early Modernist poetry/modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese poetry/Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–69).

Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses (novel)/Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."

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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.

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Language is made out of concrete things. General expressions in non- concrete terms are a laziness, they are talk, not art, not creation. They are the reaction of things on the writer, not a creative act by the writer.

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Literature is news that stays news.

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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.

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If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.

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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

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Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

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

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All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

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Either move or be moved.

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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.

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