William Carlos Williams Quotes

The earth cracks and is shriveled up; the wind moans piteously; the sky goes out if you should fail.

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

I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way

The pure products of America
go crazy...

...[] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

To hell with you and your poetry — You will rot and be blown
through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases —

It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together.

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

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.

Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness.

Unworldly love
that has no hope
of the world

and that
cannot change the world
to its delight — The rain
falls upon the earth
and grass and flowers

come
perfectly

into form from its
liquid

clearness

But love is
unworldly

and nothing
comes of it but love

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed — Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat — They're starving me — I'm all right — I won't go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat!
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please — Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher — Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear — Oh you think you're smart
you young people,

she said, but I'll tell you
you don't know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I'm tired
of them and rolled her head away.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

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.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.