Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound is making an aesthetic threat sound like a diagnosis: art that loses contact with the body starts to die. The word "atrophy" isn’t casual; it frames modern culture as something that can become technically elaborate while quietly losing its muscle. For Pound, "dance" isn’t just literal choreography. It’s meter, pulse, breath, the social fact that rhythm once belonged to communal movement before it belonged to the page. He’s warning that music, when it floats off into pure abstraction, becomes a laboratory exercise; poetry, when it forgets its sonic spine, becomes prose wearing fancy shoes.

The subtext is a rebuke to two kinds of prestige. One is the concert-hall tendency toward complexity as virtue: a music that proves intelligence by making the listener sit still. The other is literary poetry that performs seriousness through difficulty while neglecting the ear. Pound’s modernism is often remembered for fragmentation and learned allusion, but here he’s insisting on a simpler standard: does it move? Not ideologically, not philosophically - physically.

Context matters because Pound is arguing against the late Victorian habit of treating poetry as refined sentiment and against a modernist temptation to turn art into private code. His imagist and vorticist instincts push toward compression, cadence, and drive - language as struck metal, not upholstered thought. He’s also smuggling in a politics of attention: when art detaches from dance and music, it can become the property of specialists. Keeping it close to rhythm keeps it answerable to ordinary human perception.