I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Ezra PoundWith Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
Ezra PoundMy 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 PoundThe Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound