Politics & Power Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound makes “literature” sound less like entertainment and more like a vital organ: when it weakens, the whole civic body wastes away. The line is pointedly diagnostic, almost medical. “Declines” isn’t a shift in taste; it’s a symptom. “Atrophies and decays” is what happens when a culture stops exercising its imagination, its language, its capacity for precision. Pound’s stake is high because his modernism treated words as tools that either cut cleanly or go blunt. Bad writing, for him, isn’t harmless kitsch; it’s a national loss of nerve.

The subtext is combative and elitist in a way that’s typical of Pound: he’s warning against mass complacency and bureaucratic language, but he’s also smuggling in an argument for standards enforced by a confident few. The sentence flatters the idea of the poet as a kind of cultural engineer, responsible for keeping the nation’s linguistic metabolism alive. It’s a pitch for attention, funding, and seriousness, delivered as prophecy.

Context sharpens the provocation. Pound lived through industrialized war, the rise of propaganda, and the spectacle of modern states learning how to manage populations through slogans. He also disgraced himself politically, embracing Italian Fascism and broadcasting antisemitic rants - which complicates any clean reading of “national health.” The irony is brutal: the man insisting that a nation’s language must stay alive also helped demonstrate how language can be weaponized. The quote still works because it’s less a moral claim than a warning about cultural infrastructure: starve the art of thinking in public, and you don’t just get worse poems; you get worse citizens.