Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a villa...ge.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who ma...kes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune ... in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this.... He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent--for every effect a perfect cause--and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat,... They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, s...hy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. Amer...ican medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could ha...ve thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are certain stereotypes that are offensive. Some of them don't worry me, though. For instance, I have always thought that Ma...mmy character in Gone with the Wind was mighty funny. And I just loved "Amos 'n' Andy" on the radio. So you see, I have enough confidence in myself that those things did not bother me. I could laugh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's plunder--where? Tankard, or spoon,... Earring, or stone, A watch, some ancient brooch To match the grandmamma, Staid sleeping there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »