William Carlos Williams

I liked this because of the elimination of the essential in the composition. I cut it down and down, and down. This squeezed up to make it vivid.

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.

Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized
of new kinds — since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat — since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness

With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining — grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire

Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken
as night
advances

The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal
of despair
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love
what we have lost in the anticipation — a descent follows
endless and indestructible

That which is possible is inevitable.

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

Time passes and pisses on us all.

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.

Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.

If anything of the moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.

"The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro.
Strange recompense, in the depths of our despair at the unfathomable mist into which all mankind is plunging, a curious force awakens. It is Hope long asleep, aroused once more. Wilson has taken an army of advisers and sailed for England. The ship has sunk. But the men are all good swimmers. They take the women on their shoulders and buoyed on by the inspiration of the moment they churn the free seas with their sinewy arms, like Ulysses, landing all along the European seaboard.
Yes, hope has awakened once more in men's hearts. It is NEW! Let us go forward!
The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of "Art", takes the lead! Her Feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass."