230 quotes
The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men
Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take,
Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The world is a force, not a presence.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
Harmonium (1923)
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
Harmonium (1923)
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.
Harmonium (1923)
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
Harmonium (1923)
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
Harmonium (1923)
Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Harmonium (1923)
His function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfils himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
The Language of Poetry (1942)
The subject-matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.
The Language of Poetry (1942)
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Harmonium (1923)
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
All poetry is experimental poetry.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
All history is modern history.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)