Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Starvation turns into a credential here, not a calamity. Pound is riffing on the old bohemian myth that real poets earn their art through deprivation, wearing poverty like formalwear. The line’s awkward, almost stuttering syntax ("I could I trust") feels like a mind improvising in real time, as if he’s catching himself halfway between bravado and doubt. That self-interruption matters: it’s the crack in the pose. He wants the romance of the starving artist, but the language betrays the strain of insisting on it.

"It’s listed as part of the poetic training" is the sly poison pill. Pound frames suffering as curriculum, as if the artist’s life comes with a syllabus: aesthetics, prosody, and hunger. The joke lands because it’s both ridiculous and recognizable. Early modernism sold itself as an elite counterculture, a hard discipline against soft bourgeois comfort. Pound, forever auditioning for the role of cultural drill sergeant, turns even lack of money into an aesthetic program - a proof of seriousness, an initiation rite.

Context sharpens the irony. Pound’s career is full of high-minded talk about craft, value, and the corruption of modern society, but also full of self-mythologizing. This quip is the seed of a larger Poundian habit: converting personal hardship into theory, then selling the theory as moral authority. The subtext isn’t just "artists suffer". It’s "I know the rules of artistic legitimacy, and I can perform them - even if they might kill me."