Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

New York turns into a kind of secular cosmos in Pound's hands: not a city admired for parks or skyline, but a machine that manufactures awe. The key move is the pivot from a coy question ("the most beautiful?") to a dazzled near-yes, a posture that lets him sound both skeptical and seduced. He isn't praising civic virtue; he's praising an electrical spectacle. "Squares after squares of flame" reads like a Futurist postcard, the grid itself becoming an aesthetic, light disciplining space into legible geometry. The city doesn't just glitter; it's "cut into the aether", as if Manhattan were engraving its signature onto the old metaphysical realm.

The subtext is competitive and slightly imperial: Europe had cathedrals and constellations; America has illumination, scale, and the confidence to call it art. "Here is our poetry" is a provocation aimed at inherited cultural hierarchies, a declaration that modernity can generate its own sublime without borrowing antique symbols. When he claims "we have pulled down the stars to our will", it's both triumphal and faintly ominous. This is Prometheus with wiring, a boast about human mastery that flirts with hubris.

Context matters. Pound was an early 20th-century modernist, intoxicated by speed, industry, and new forms, eager to break poetry out of pastoral reverie. Before his later political catastrophes, you can see the modernist wager: the metropolis as the new epic landscape, where technology doesn't kill wonder, it mass-produces it.