31 quotes
Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.
Classics Revisited (1968)
There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.
Classics Revisited (1968)
The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.
In Defense of the Earth (1956)
Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.
Classics Revisited (1968)
What happened instead of apocalypse and judgment was a long-drawn-out apocalypse of counterrevolution against the promise and potential of a humane civilization.
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)
Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness."
Classics Revisited (1968)
Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.
More Classics Revisited (1989)
It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.
More Classics Revisited (1989)
You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. My poems are acts of force and violence directed against the evil which murders us all.
Preface to the second edition (1953)
The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)
It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.
More Classics Revisited (1989)
When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.
Love is the garment of knowledge.
Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Satyricon, these are the world's major works of prose fiction.
Harvey, Galileo, Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.
Classics Revisited (1968)
What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.
Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)
All night I lay awake beside you,
Leaning on my elbow, watching your
Sleeping face, that face whose purity
Never ceases to astonish me.
In Defense of the Earth (1956)
Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
More Classics Revisited (1989)
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.