230 quotes
Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink.
Parts of a World (1942)
The natives of the rain are rainy men.
Harmonium (1923)
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
Harmonium (1923)
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
Harmonium (1923)
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
Harmonium (1923)
To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths,
One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur.
Parts of a World (1942)
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a thought.
God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).
Opus Posthumous (1957)
A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
Harmonium (1923)
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
Harmonium (1923)
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
Harmonium (1923)
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.
Opus Posthumous (1957)