230 quotes
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing
Collected Poems (1954)
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises...
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm.
The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which
We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Harmonium (1923)
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Parts of a World (1942)
We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
There are men of the East, he said,
who are the East.
There are men of a province
who are that province.
There are men of a valley
who are that valley.
Harmonium (1923)
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
The blue guitar
And I are one.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
The plum survives its poems.
Harmonium (1923)
Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
Harmonium (1923)
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell
And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crown
The eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)