Theodore Roethke Quotes

Yet for this we travelled
With hope, and not alone,
In the country of ourselves,
In a country of bright stone.

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.

There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.

You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés.

The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.

There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom. (p. 95)

In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write. (p. 89)

Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)

And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love's sake; And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.

God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will — The right thing happens to the happy man.

I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.

Being, not doing, is my first joy.