Art & Creativity Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound doesn’t just sneer at “colloquial poetry”; he demotes it to the storefront, the place where craft is simulated for quick consumption. The barber’s wax dummy is designed to be instantly legible: a head with compliant features, built to advertise a service, not to withstand scrutiny. By pairing that with sculpture, Pound draws a brutal line between an object made to resemble life and an object made to wrestle with form, time, and attention. The insult isn’t simply that colloquial verse is “simple.” It’s that it’s pre-fabricated intimacy, a put-on ease that mistakes everyday talk for aesthetic achievement.

The subtext is Pound’s lifelong war against the sloppy and the secondhand. Imagism and modernism weren’t, for him, vibes; they were discipline: precision, economy, the hard labor of making language new. “Colloquial” here is less a neutral descriptor than a charge of laziness, a refusal to earn music, structure, and surprise. He’s also policing prestige: sculpture as high art, wax as commercial imitation. That hierarchy is the point, and it reveals Pound’s modernist anxieties about mass taste and literary democratization, a fear that accessibility becomes an excuse to stop listening closely.

Context matters: Pound was writing in an era when poetry was shedding Victorian ornament and chasing “speech.” He admired clarity, but only when it was made, not merely overheard. The barb lands because it’s tactile and slightly vulgar: you can picture the dummy’s glossy deadness. He wants you to feel, viscerally, the difference between language that merely resembles life and language that remakes it.