A ball of light in one’s hands
February 27th, 2013
‘Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hands.’
Ezra Pound photographed in Kensington, London, October 22, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn
Ezra Pound
4 Responses to “A ball of light in one’s hands”
Yes, well, the problem is that in Ezra Pound’d hands the book was probably Mein Kampf.
ps, that’s Pound’s, of course. !!!
Thanks June-Marie. There’s a comprehensive overview of Pound here on Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound, which finishes with Pound’s evaluation of his work at the age of 70:
My own work does not make sense. A mess … my writing, stupidity and ignorance all the way through … the intention was bad, anything I’ve done has been an accident, in spite of my spoiled intentions the preoccupation with stupid and irrelevant matters … but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything …. I found after 70 years that I was not a lunatic but a moron. I should have been able to do better …. It’s all doubletalk … it’s all tags and patches … a mess.[111]
I was listening to this last night…
“And Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliott
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While Calypso’s singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers”
from another whose work “does not make sense”
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