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Quotes from The Wedge — William Carlos Williams

1883–1963 United States

← All quotes by William Carlos Williams

12 quotes

There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

The Wedge (1944)

Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

The Wedge (1944)

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

The Wedge (1944)

If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else.

The Wedge (1944)

A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it.

The Wedge (1944)

Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.

The Wedge (1944)

The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work.

The Wedge (1944)

It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

The Wedge (1944)

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

The Wedge (1944)

The War is the first and only thing in the world today.
The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.

The Wedge (1944)

Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.

The Wedge (1944)

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

The Wedge (1944)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William Carlos Williams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.