The Cantos: V

Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue;
but on the barb of time.
The fire? always, and the vision always,
Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting
And fading at will. Weaving with points of gold,
Gold-yellow, saffron... The roman shoe, Aurunculeia'a

barb of time: Perhaps an allusion to Giordano Bruno's motto vincit instans ("the instant triumphs"), of which Bruno says that the creative instant or inspiration is a barb of light which pierces the mind to give one a totally new perception beyond all mere logic chopping. This links up with Pound's notions regarding the "luminous detail" -- Companion

Amulet - pg. 63

And then I kept quiet while they went on badmouthing the poets of Mexico, the ones they were going to blow out of the water, and I thought about the dead poets, like Dario and Huidobro, and about all the encounters that never occurred. The truth is that our history is full of encounters that never occurred. We didn't have our Pound or our Yeats; we had Huidobro and Dario instead. We had what we had.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 141

A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were, in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 197

As a matter of fact, Pound's entire career, the tragedy of his career, might be said to consist of an obsessive need to create straw men so that he can knock them over. In other words, he's very strange and literary.