William Carlos Williams
Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.Collection: Eye
That which is possible is inevitable.Collection: Inevitable
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.Collection: Suicidal
The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.Collection: Secret
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Comment
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Writing
What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.Collection: Love
A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.Collection: Rain
If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.Collection: Pleasure
But the sea which no one tends is also a gardenCollection: Garden
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.Collection: Imagination
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.Collection: Rain
No ideas but in things.Collection: Ideas
The descent beckons as the ascent beckonedCollection: Ascent
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.Collection: History
I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.Collection: Writing
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.Collection: Heart
A new music is a new mind.Collection: Mind
Nothing whips my blood like verse.Collection: Blood
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.Collection: Song
Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.Collection: Men
As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the worldCollection: Rain
The pure products of America go crazyCollection: Crazy
Death will be too late to bring us aid.Collection: Aids
It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Way
The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.Collection: Writing
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.Collection: Beauty
To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.Collection: Imagination
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.Collection: Roots
beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.Collection: Reality
No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.Collection: Errors
Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Failure
Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May againCollection: Sweet
History must stay open, it is all humanity.Collection: History
You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?Collection: Sex
So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Moving
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 perishCollection: Men
Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edgeCollection: Love Is
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?Collection: Baby
Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.Collection: Imagination