William Carlos Williams Quotes

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

Meanwhile, the old man who goes about gathering dog-lime walks in the gutter without looking up and his tread is more majestic than that of the Episcopal minister approaching the pulpit of a Sunday. These things astonish me beyond words.

Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself - sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.

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.

Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city — flying apart at his approaches

* S * * O * * D * * A * * * *

Unleashed! Alone, watching the May moon above the trees . At nine o’clock the park closes. You must be out of the lake, dressed, in your cars and going: they change into their street clothes in the back seats and move out among the trees . The “great beast” all removed before the plunging night, the crickets’ black wings and hylas wake .

I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!

from “Danse Russe

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

"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, –"

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.

perhaps it is all art
and Barnum our one genius (in the arts)
on the moral plane

If you are not already too blind
too deaf, too lost in the past
to know or to care — I will write a book about you — making you live (in a book!)
as you still desperately
want to live — to live always — unforgiving