Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound’s genius here is the feigned shrug: the voice of a high priest of modernism pretending to be a baffled tourist, stumped by “the jargon of sculptors” even as he’s busy registering exactly what the object does to him. The sentence performs a small rebellion against expert discourse. He doesn’t attack sculpture; he attacks the social machinery that says admiration must come with the correct vocabulary, the right reasons, the sanctioned explanation.

The image he can’t stop himself from sketching is deliciously ungentle: “green granite,” “female,” “apparently pregnant,” “monster,” “one eye,” “going around a square corner.” It reads like a parody of avant-garde description, but it’s also a compact lesson in how modern art works on the nerves before it works on the intellect. Pound’s “I do not know precisely why” is not a confession of failure; it’s an admission that the encounter is bodily, pre-theoretical, and therefore harder to domesticate.

Context matters: Pound spent his career evangelizing new forms and new standards, yet he also distrusted the museum label, the professionalized haze around taste. The subtext is a modernist dilemma: the artwork is shocking enough to demand new language, but the new language quickly becomes its own kind of tyranny. So he needles both camps at once - the public who wants art to be legible and the insiders who want it to be explainable.

The joke lands because the admiration survives the mockery. Even reduced to a “pregnant monster,” the sculpture wins. Pound’s irritation is the backhanded tribute.