Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

A manifesto disguised as a definition, Pound's line treats literature less like a moral salon and more like a high-voltage circuit. "Charged" is the giveaway: meaning isn't politely conveyed, it's concentrated, pressurized, made to carry current. The implicit enemy here is the flabby, generalized prose of Victorian gentility and newspaper-style churn, language that reports but doesn't ignite. Pound is drawing a hard boundary around what counts as "great": not earnest sentiment, not big themes, not good intentions, but maximum density per syllable.

The subtext is both aesthetic and combative. Pound's modernist project (Imagism, Vorticism, the rallying cry of "Make it new") demanded compression: the right word, the clean image, the line that refuses padding. By defining greatness as an "utmost possible degree", he smuggles in an ethic of extremity. Art becomes a discipline of selection and sacrifice. If a sentence doesn't earn its place, it dilutes the charge.

There's also a provocative narrowing at work. "Meaning" here isn't just message; it's implication, resonance, allusion, the way a phrase can haul history and emotion in its wake. Pound is arguing for language as a kind of storage device: lyric as hard drive, poem as capacitor. Read in context of his era's upheavals - industrial speed, mass media, war - the quote sounds like a refusal to let words become cheapened currency. It insists on a counter-economy where value comes from intensity, not volume.