William Carlos Williams Quotes

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized ... A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in - when the old loyalties - God, country, and the hope of Heaven - aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in - someone who seems beautiful.

All to no end save beauty
the eternal
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

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.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences 'freshly and with the appearance of reality'… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

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

No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

Unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

I asked him, What do you do?

He smiled patiently, The typical American question.
In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or,
What are you doing now?

What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No
sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire
occupation.

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

But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

So most of my life has been lived in hell.

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/ ... the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

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.

they are mystified by certain instances.

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.

Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.

There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

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.

A new world is only a new mind.

O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.

beauty' is related not to 'loveliness' but to a state in which reality plays a part.

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.

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*.

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.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

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.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

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

And there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them

Death will be late to bring us aid

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

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

You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?

So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

In summer, the song sings itself.

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

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.

Black wind, I have poured my heart out
to you until I am sick of it-

Now I run my hand over you feeling
the play of your body - the quiver
of it's strength-

Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months' wonder, the city
the man, an identity - it can't be
otherwise - an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.

A poem is a small machine made of words ... Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

Marriage
So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter ...

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.

ARRIVAL And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom - feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind ... !

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

It's just a moment, we die every night.

I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!

Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.

The perfect man of action, is the suicide.

Sunshine of late afternoon
On the glass tray
a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which
a key is lying
And the
immaculate white bed

Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?

By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.

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

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile.

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

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.

Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

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

For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.

A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.

Fools have big wombs.

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

…those who belong properly to books, and to whom books, perhaps, do not quite so properly belong.

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

If there is progress then there is a novel.

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 past above, the future below
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech
is, of necessity, my sole concern.

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

When I am alone I am happy.

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written.
A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence.
Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.

Through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.

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.

Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.