William Carlos Williams
39 quotes
Biography
"This is Just to Say I have eatenthe plumsthat were inthe iceboxand whichyou were probablysavingfor breakfastForgive methey were deliciousso sweetand so cold"
"We sit and talk,quietly, with long lapses of silenceand I am aware of the streamthat has no language, coursingbeneath the quiet heaven ofyour eyeswhich has no speech"
"It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there."
"You lethargic, waiting upon me,waiting for the fire and Iattendant upon you, shaken by your beautyShaken by your beauty Shaken."
"It is at the edge of the petal that love waits"
"Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze."
"I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it."
"If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem."
"so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens."
"One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect."
"To tell the truth, I myself never quite feel that I know what I am talking about — if I did, and when I do, the thing written seems nothing to me. However, what I do write and allow to survive I always feel is worth while and that nobody else has ever come as near as I have to the thing I have intimated if not expressed. To me it's a matter of first understanding that which may not be put to words. I might add more but to no purpose. In a sense, I must express myself, you're right, but always completely incomplete if that means anything."
"It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together."
"The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic."
"Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard."
"Why do we live? Most of us need the very thing we never ask for. We talk about revolution as if it was peanuts. What we need is some frank thinking and a few revolutions in our own guts; to hell with what most of the sons of bitches that I know and myself along with them if I don't take hold of myself and turn about when I need to — or go ahead further if that's the game."
"Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission."
"My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. … it filled me with soul satisfying joy."
"There's a lot of bastards out there!"
"<!-- I'm tired of everything I wrote in these formative years. I was always searching for a regular format of the line, just as I wanted to be regular in my life — to conform. But --> I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry."
"The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past."
"Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle."
"Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance."
"There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words."
"Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy."
"Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety."