Barbara’s studio

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Interviewer:  Your work includes a great range of experience, as well as of form.  What do you think is the greatest quality a poet can have?  Is it formal, or is it a quality of thinking?

Ezra Pound:  I don’t know that you can put the needed qualities in hierarchic order, but he must have a continuous curiosity, which of course does not make him a writer. but if he hasn’t got that he will wither.  And the question of doing anything about it depends on a persistent energy.  A man like Agassiz is never bored, never tired.  The transit from the reception of stimuli to the recording, to the correlation, that is what takes the whole energy of a lifetime.

Writers at Work:  The Paris Review Interviews Second Series, edited by George Plimpton and introduced by Van Wyck Brooks

Comments are welcome!