Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound’s line is a provocation dressed up as a neat epigram: if literature matters, it’s because it refuses to expire. “News” is the language of urgency and churn, the daily feed that tells you what happened and then makes room for the next thing. By yoking literature to news, Pound smuggles high art into the marketplace of attention and dares you to judge poems by their staying power, not their polish.

The subtext is polemical, and very Poundian. He’s not praising “timelessness” in some museum-glass sense; he’s issuing a standard for relevance. Good writing should keep breaking into the present tense, continuing to report on the human situation long after its original headlines have yellowed. That framing also flatters the reader’s ego: to read is to be “informed,” not merely cultured. Pound knew the modern world was rewiring how people processed reality - faster, noisier, more distracted - and he wanted literature to compete on that terrain, not retreat from it.

Context sharpens the edge. Pound helped drive modernism’s obsession with making it new, with hard edits, sharp images, and a distrust of mushy Victorian sentiment. Calling literature “news” is a swipe at art that feels ornamental or secondhand. It’s also a subtle endorsement of translation, remix, and revival: a text stays news when it can be re-circulated, re-read, and re-weaponized by later moments.

There’s irony here, too: Pound, a man who disastrously confused propaganda with truth in his own politics, still nails the distinction between information and insight. The best “news” isn’t the update; it’s the pattern you can’t unsee.