Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound writes like a man trying to bully art back into danger. “Craft and violence” is not a call for literal bloodshed so much as an aesthetic ultimatum: technique alone is dead, but raw impulse without technique is just noise. What he wants is collision. The modern artist, in his view, earns relevance only by forcing form to absorb pressure - historical, psychological, political - until the work shows strain marks. “His gods are violent gods” drips with pagan swagger, a deliberate rejection of polite, Christian gentility and the Victorian faith that art should console or edify. Pound is manufacturing a mythology where tenderness is suspect and friction is proof of life.

The subtext is gatekeeping with a purpose. Pound is carving out a moral hierarchy of attention: art that doesn’t register “strife” isn’t merely different; it’s “uninteresting,” unworthy of the modern eye. That word is the knife. He’s not arguing taste, he’s prescribing a standard that flatters his own project - modernism as an earned hardness, a discipline of cuts, compressions, and refusals.

Context matters because Pound’s modernism is inseparable from his appetite for authority. He championed rupture (Imagism’s clean edge, Vorticism’s energy), but he also chased grand systems and “strong” ideas in politics with disastrous results. The line reveals the same impulse: a belief that culture needs shock therapy, that beauty must be wrestled into being. It’s thrilling as rhetoric, and unsettling as temperament - a manifesto that treats serenity as a failure of nerve.