Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound turns craft into a moral tribunal: technique is not decoration but the lie detector of art. The jab is aimed at the perennial romantic alibi that “feeling” excuses clumsiness. For Pound, sincerity isn’t a mood you report; it’s something you prove under pressure, by submitting your impulse to form. If you can’t be bothered to learn how to make the line do what you claim you mean, he implies, you don’t mean it enough - or what you mean isn’t substantial.

The subtext is characteristically Poundian: contempt for the sentimental amateur and a near-religious faith in discipline. “Test” is the key word. Technique doesn’t guarantee greatness, but it exposes the difference between conviction and self-indulgence. It’s also a manifesto move. Pound is building a hierarchy in which value is earned through labor, apprenticeship, and precision - the very virtues his modernist circle wielded against late-Victorian lushness and what he saw as flabby, inherited rhetoric.

Context sharpens the provocation. Pound helped engineer Imagism’s demand for exactness (“direct treatment of the thing”) and later pushed Vorticism’s harder, engineered energies. In that world, form is content’s bloodstream: if it’s weak, the body collapses. The line about “inferior value” isn’t merely aesthetic snobbery; it’s a culture war claim that art should be made, not merely expressed. Technique becomes ethics: respect for the reader, for language, for the difficulty of making something that lasts.