Sunday, May 11, 2025

Pound on himself and his work

 I would love to better understand the state of Ezra Pound’s mind.

Late in life, he had conversations that suggest he had at least some idea of the mess he’d made. When the novelist and short-story writer Richard Stern asked him how he was, Pound replied:

 

Senile. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ve always been wrong.

 

When Daniel Cory, George Santayana’s secretary, asked him how his work was going, Pound replied:

 

It’s a botch … I knew too little about so many things … I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make … a work of art.”

 

• Source: Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound; London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, pp. 105 and 107.

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