The difference between Pound and Whitman is not between the democrat who in deep distress could look hopefully toward the future a...nd the fascist madly in love with the past. It is that between the woodsman and the woodcarver. It is that between the mystic harking back to his vision and the artist whose first allegiance is to his craft, and so to the reality it presents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your appro...aching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much of the emotional turmoil in the second year revolves around the difficult task of integrating the child's will into the famil...y constellation. The child learns that her personal wishes (so cherished, seemingly so right) need to fit reasonably well with what others want. The parents learn that they, too, have to say "no" with firmness and conviction but hopefully without harshness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is ... useful to distinguish between the pornographic, condemned in every society, and the bawdy, the ribald, the shared vulgar...ities and jokes, which are the safety valves of most social systems. Pornography is a most doubtful safety valve. In extreme cases it may feed the perverted imagination of the doomed man who starts by pulling a little girl's braid and ends by cutting off a little girl's head, as each increasing stimulus loses its effectiveness and must be replaced by a more extreme one. This is particularly true of the pornography primarily designed to be brooded over in secret. But is quite otherwise with the music hall jokes, the folk ribaldry at a wedding, the innocent smut of the smoking rooms, where men who are perennially faithful to their wives exchange stories which release explosive laughter. Pornography does not lead to laughter, it leads to deadly serious pursuit of sexual satisfaction divorced from personality and from every other meaning. The uproarious laugh of the group who recognize a common dilemma--the laughter of a group of women at the story of the intractable unborn who refused to budge and merely shivered under the effects of the quart of ice cream hopefully eaten by its poor mother, the laughter of a group of men at the story of the bride who asked to be "frightened" a fourth time--is the laughter of human beings who are making the best of the imperfect social arrangements within which their life here on earth is conducted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully as...ked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think, for the rest of my life, I shall refrain from looking up things. It is the most ravenous time-snatcher I know. You pull o...ne book from the shelf, which carries a hint or a reference that sends you posthaste to another book, and that to successive others. It is incredible, the number of books you hopefully open and disappointedly close, only to take down another with the same result.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »