Life & Mortality Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound’s line lands like a broken bottle in polite conversation: deliberately ugly, morally radioactive, and sharpened into a kind of street-level epigram. The phrasing is jaunty in a way that makes the violence worse. “Bump off” and “parts unknown” borrow the slangy ease of crime stories, as if murder and self-erasure were just plot mechanics. That tonal mismatch is the point. Pound is staging contempt as style, turning nihilism into a performance of hardboiled “sense” meant to puncture any sentimental framing of suicide.

The specific intent reads less as policy prescription than as a provocation: an attempt to reroute the moral charge of suicide outward, toward enemies (“swine”) who supposedly deserve a share of the exit costs. The subtext is a fantasy of retroactive meaning. Suicide, in this logic, isn’t an act of despair; it’s an act that can be made “useful” if it also punishes someone else. That utilitarian gloss reveals a brutal impatience with suffering that isn’t politically or personally legible to him.

Context matters because Pound’s genius and his ugliness were never separable. His career is shadowed by fascist sympathies, broadcast propaganda, and a taste for purifying rhetoric: the world divided into the worthy and the corrupt, the “swine” and everyone else. The line’s cruelty isn’t incidental; it’s part of a worldview where violence can be aestheticized and accountability can be outsourced to targets he’s already dehumanized. It’s wit weaponized into moral evasion.