W.S. Merwin
12 quotes
Biography
William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration.
"Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color."
"part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you"
"My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy."
"from what we cannot hold the stars are made"
"I offer you what I have myPoverty"
"Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca."
"So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words"
"We keep asking where they have gonethose years we remember and wereach for them like hands in the night"
"What you remember saves you."
"Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for"
"On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree"
"I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time."