William Carlos Williams Quotes

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless. — through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.

"Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences "freshly and with the appearance of reality" –
This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –"

My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. … it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

He's come out of the man and he's let the man go —

Your case has been reviewed by high-minded and unprejudiced observers (like hell they were!) the president of a great university, the president of a noteworthy technical school and a judge too old to sit on the bench, men already rewarded for their services to pedagogy and the enforcement of arbitrary statutes. In other words pimps to tradition —

Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it - It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but -

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere — if he is to retain his sanity, and why not? The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work.

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

I have had my dream — like others — And it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
With feet planted on the ground,
And look up at the sky — Feeling my clothes about me,
The weight of my body in my shoes,
The rim of my hat, air passing in and out
At my nose — and decide to dream no more.

To tell the truth, I myself never quite feel that I know what I am talking about — if I did, and when I do, the thing written seems nothing to me. However, what I do write and allow to survive I always feel is worth while and that nobody else has ever come as near as I have to the thing I have intimated if not expressed. To me it's a matter of first understanding that which may not be put to words. I might add more but to no purpose. In a sense, I must express myself, you're right, but always completely incomplete if that means anything.

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning