Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

"Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use"

Ezra Pound, Poet

About this Quote

Pound’s line doesn’t flatter literature; it conscripts it. “Does not exist in a vacuum” is the opening shove against the genteel fantasy of art as a sealed aesthetic terrarium, answerable only to taste. He’s arguing that writing is public infrastructure, not private therapy: it sits inside economies, institutions, and power. The word “function” is doing the heavy lifting, turning the writer from inspired individual into a kind of social technician.

The sharper blade is “exactly proportional to their ability.” Pound isn’t praising civic-minded amateurs; he’s laying down a hierarchy where talent is the only legitimate credential for influence. In his world, good writing earns authority, and bad writing forfeits it. That’s both bracing and authoritarian: it grants art real stakes while quietly implying that the gifted should steer the culture.

Context matters because Pound wasn’t a neutral referee calling balls and strikes. As a modernist impresario, he believed literature could renovate public life by renovating language. He championed craft, compression, clarity - not as stylistic preferences but as moral and cultural necessities. The subtext is a warning: sloppy language isn’t just ugly; it’s socially damaging because it trains a population in sloppy thinking.

“This is their main use” lands with the chill of utilitarianism. It demotes entertainment, self-expression, even beauty, to side effects. Coming from Pound - whose political entanglements famously went toxic - the line reads like a manifesto for the power of art, and a reminder of how easily that power can be claimed as a mandate.

Quote Details

Topic	Writing
Source	Help us find the source

More Quotes by Ezra Add to List

About the Author

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (October 30, 1885 - November 1, 1972) was a Poet from USA.

48 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties"

Graham Greene, Playwright

"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive"

Lionel Trilling, Critic

"The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel"

Norman Spinrad, Author

"Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

George Henry Lewes

"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators"

Ian Hunter, Musician

"Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives"

Paul Kane, Writer

"On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history"

Octavio Paz, Poet

"A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate"

John Barton, Poet

John Barton

"A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow"

Marguerite Young, Author

"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake"

E. L. Doctorow, Author

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people"

Thomas Mann, Writer

Thomas Mann

"I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity"

Chaim Potok, Author

"The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it"

Mary A. Ward

"Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world"

Jeanette Winterson, Novelist

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone"

John Updike, Novelist

John Updike

"There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world"

John Fowles, Writer

John Fowles

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novelist