Art & Creativity Quote by Ezra Pound

Leave it to Ezra Pound to turn domestic life into a bureaucratic nuisance and romance into a scheduling problem. The line crackles with his modernist obsession: art isn’t something you do after dinner; it is the jealous center that everything else must orbit. Marriage, in his framing, is dangerous not because intimacy is bad, but because ordinary intimacy demands a whole person. Pound wants the opposite: a partner who desires the work, the “artist part,” more than the messy human behind it. That’s not just elitism; it’s a manifesto for self-mythologizing, where the maker is a vessel and the private self is collateral.

The “illegal” is pitched as a joke, but it’s also a power move. He’s smuggling in a moral hierarchy: art first, people second. The conditional (“If the artist must marry”) reads like a reluctant concession to biology, as if love is an inconvenient appetite. Then comes the devastatingly comic solution: tea three times a week. Not a home, not a life, not a partnership - a polite, rationed ritual. It’s intimacy with visiting hours, the domestic tamed into etiquette so it can’t interfere with the real vocation.

Context matters: Pound’s era treated “the artist” as a kind of priesthood, and modernism thrived on the drama of renunciation. The subtext is as cold as it is seductive: to be serious, you must be singular, even at the cost of being unlivable.