People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

--- Ezra Pound

Beneath T.S. Eliot's bland exterior glows the unwavering conviction that the poet, in morning coat or drinking tea, possesses chiefly a more honest mind than most minds, yielding him at the end of rigorous ardors an intuition of which one aspect, as it was for Conrad's Kurtz, is horror.

And the poet walks through the streets of London or Boston bearing this intermittent knowledge.

--- Hugh Kenner,  The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot

She had the gift of entering completely into the mind of the man she loved. Her enormous concentration fanned her partner's intellectual fire. Her unusually strong will liked to triumph over men. I think that Nietzsche was right when he said that Lou was a thoroughly evil woman. Evil, however, in the Goethean sense: evil that produces good. In my talks with Lou things became clear to me that I might not have found by myself. Like a catalyst she activated my thought processes. She may have destroyed lives and marriages, but her presence was exciting. One felt the spark of genius in her. One grew in her presence.

--Poul Bjerre, about Lou Salomé, romantically involved with Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud, among others.

(C.f. Francine Prose,  The Lives of the Muses.)

Leroi Jones wrote, "In the Fifties, Allen Ginsberg played the role that Ezra Pound had played during the Twenties, hipping people to each other, trying to get various people published.

Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel