William carlos williams quotes

A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.

A new music is a new mind.

The pure products of America go crazy

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

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.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow

I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way

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.

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

A new world is only a new mind.

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

What power has love but forgiveness?

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

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.

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.

It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

Empty pockets make empty heads.

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention.

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.

There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.

I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!

No ideas but in things.

In summer, the song sings itself.

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.

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.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.

Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.

That which is possible is inevitable.

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

Death will be too late to bring us aid.

Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.

and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

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.

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.

Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.

History must stay open, it is all humanity.

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.

No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.

You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish

A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?

When I am alone I am happy.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.

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.

But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.

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.

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.

Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them

through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?

It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you

Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.

There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

A poem is a small machine made of words.

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.

If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements