Marianne Moore Quotes

I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins.

A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

If you demand on the other hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.

The pulse of intention does not move so that one
Can see it, and moral machinery is not labelled, but
The future of time is determined by the power of volition.

I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.

Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

...in which letters are written / not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.

He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light — that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

Yule — Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner — of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

The hands are the heart's messengers.