William Carlos Williams Quotes

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

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.

Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.

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.

These are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night

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

It's all you deserve. You've got the cash, what the hell do you care? You've got nothing to lose. You are inheritors of a great tradition. My country right or wrong! You do what you're told to do. You don't answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben Frank or Georgie Washing. I'll say you don't. You're civilized. You let your betters tell you where you get off. Go ahead —

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 —

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

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind — But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested — the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.

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 pure products of America go crazy —