Skip to content

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

— Richard Wilbur National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)

Another quote →

More quotes by Richard Wilbur

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

Opposites (1973)

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws
For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
"I merely leap and pause."

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."

Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.

Walking to Sleep (1969)

All Richard Wilbur quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Wilbur (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.