Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Either move or be moved is a six-word ultimatum that captures Pound’s entire aesthetic program: art as force, not ornament. The line snaps like a commandment, and its power comes from the brutal binary it sets up. There’s no third option for drifting, no romantic permission to “find yourself.” You act, or you become material acted upon. Pound, the great modernist traffic cop, is always trying to shove culture out of the ditch.

The verb choice does double duty. “Move” is physical and moral: change your position, change your mind, change the form. It’s also musical, the way a line of verse can move the ear. “Be moved” is the passive voice made existential: to be pushed by history, by other people’s tastes, by institutions, by the market. Pound hated the soft tyranny of received ideas, and he also hated sloppy feeling. This is him insisting on agency and precision at once: if you want to be moved emotionally, earn it by moving the language first.

Context sharpens the edge. Pound’s modernism was a revolt against Victorian verbosity and cultural inertia; his slogan-like compression is itself a demonstration of imagist economy. But it’s also a warning that reads darker once you remember how easily Pound’s appetite for “energy” curdled into political extremism. The line admires motion so much it risks fetishizing force. That tension is the subtext: modernity rewards momentum, and the cost of refusing to steer is being swept along by someone else’s velocity.