Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.

Pound’s remark treats dance as music’s bodily and social anchor: rhythm made visible, communal, and physically felt. To say music “atrophies” when it strays too far from dance is to argue that musical vitality depends on pulse, movement, and an underlying kinetic logic—qualities that can weaken when composition becomes overly abstract, cerebral, or detached from lived human motion. The claim also aligns with Pound’s broader modernist preference for energy, precision, and “measure” over diffuse sentimentality: art should retain a driving, patterned force rather than dissolve into formless complexity. It is less an anti-intellectual stance than a warning that technique without embodied rhythm risks sterility.