William Carlos Williams Quotes

Observe
the jasmine lightness
of the moon.

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze — or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard? — as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes — below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore — Which shore? — the sand clings to my lips — Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round you –

It lives as pictures only can : by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky...

Dear Mama: The reason I didn’t write last Sunday was because I was out of town. My friend Pound invited me to spend Saturday and Sunday with him … His parents are very nice people and have always been exceptionally kind to me. Mrs. Pound had prepared a fine meal … After supper Pound and I went to his room where we had a long talk on subjects that I love yet have not time to study and which he is making a life work of. That is literature, and the drama and the classics, also a little philosophy. He, Pound, is a fine fellow; he is the essence of optimism and has a cast-iron faith that is something to admire. If he ever does get blue nobody knows it, so he is just the man for me. But not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him and why? Because he is so darned full of conceits and affectation. He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making himself just exactly what he is not: a laughing boor. His friends must be all patience in order to find him out and even then you must not let him know it, for he will immediately put on some artificial mood and be really unbearable. It is too bad, for he loves to be liked, yet there is some quality in him which makes him too proud to try to please people. I am sure his only fault is an exaggeration of a trait that in itself is good and in every way admirable. He is afraid of being taken in if he trusts his really tender heart to mercies of a cruel crowd and so keeps it hidden and trusts no one.

Pop told me many times after that that he had sent a wire forthwith to Jesse Paine, an old friend and neighbor of ours from Passaic Avenue, then residing in Los Angeles, asking what, if anything, had happened to Lou, his wife. Two weeks later he received a letter saying that Jesse was sorry not to have been able to answer the telegram sooner, the reason being that Lou had been ill; in fact at the time the telegram had arrived, she was in the hospital where, that day, she had been given up for dead, following a serious abdominal operation

Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it! Run from it, if you will. So be it. (Winds that enshroud us in their folds — or no wind). So be it. Pull at the doors, of a hot afternoon, doors that the wind holds, wrenches from our arms — and hands. So be it. The Library is sanctuary to our fears. So be it. So be it. — the wind that has tripped us, pressed upon us, prurient or upon the prurience of our fears — laughter fading. So be it.

Падение, вызванное отчаянием,
И без достижений
Приводит к новому пробуждению:
Которое — возрождение отчаяния.

Чего мы не можем достичь,
Что запрещено нам любить,
Что потеряли мы в ожидании — За этим следует падение.

It is difficult to get the news from poems

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it.

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

Not now. Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground. Empty pockets make empty heads. Cure it if you can but do not believe that we can live today in the country for the country will bring us no peace.

There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous. It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else.

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.