Wealth & Money Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound’s image is deliberately indecent: art doesn’t float above the crowd, it ferments in what the crowd throws off. “Rich effluvium” is a taunt dressed as botany, the kind of phrase that forces refinement to look at its own origins. He collapses the romantic myth of inspiration into a compost heap: humanity as waste, manure, soil. Not pretty, not pure, but chemically necessary.

The intent is two-pronged. First, it’s a defense of high art that refuses sentimental humanism. Pound isn’t praising people as noble; he’s saying the great work requires the whole messy discharge of living - the appetites, the mistakes, the vulgarity, the historical detritus. Second, it’s a rebuke to artists who want to pretend they’re self-generated geniuses. A tree can be rare and towering, but it still feeds on rot.

The subtext carries Pound’s modernist program: “Make it new” doesn’t mean invent from nothing; it means transmute. Manure becomes nutrient through time, pressure, and process - a useful metaphor for how modernism cannibalizes the archive, the street, the daily noise, and turns it into form. There’s also a faintly authoritarian whiff: humanity as raw material, art as the higher organism that justifies the mess below. Coming from Pound - a poet of enormous craft and catastrophic politics - the line reads like both an aesthetic truth and a warning about what happens when you start treating people as compost for “culture.”