Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound’s line is less a bohemian shrug than a manifesto with teeth: genius, he argues, isn’t just allowed to break rules, it’s entitled to. The phrasing matters. “Right” turns aesthetic choice into a claim that can’t be negotiated by polite taste or institutional gatekeeping. It’s a rhetorical power move from a poet who spent his career trying to redraw the borders of English verse.

The intent is defensive and aggressive at once. Pound is shielding experimentation - the jagged collage of modernism, the imported rhythms, the refusal of Victorian prettiness - from the charge of incoherence. If the work feels “wrong,” the problem is your expectation, not his method. The subtext is a demand for critics to update their operating system: judge the expression by its achieved effect, not by inherited decorum.

Context sharpens the edge. Pound championed “Make it new,” pushing imagism’s precision and later the sprawling, polyglot ambition of The Cantos. Modernism wasn’t merely a style; it was a rebellion against exhausted forms after industrial modernity and war had made old cadences feel dishonest. His statement also smuggles in hierarchy: only “a man of genius” gets the hall pass. Everyone else is still subject to the rules.

That’s where the quote curdles into something uncomfortable, because Pound’s own life shows how “mode of expression” can slide from formal innovation into moral abdication. The line captures modernism’s brilliance and its temptation: to treat artistic authority as a license - not just to reinvent art, but to exempt oneself from ordinary accountability.