230 quotes
There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
Harmonium (1923)
Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.
Parts of a World (1942)
The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.
Transport to Summer (1947)
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate
And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,
Beau linguist.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
Collected Poems (1954)
These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Harmonium (1923)
Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)