Quotes from William Carlos Williams

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

But love is unworldly, and nothing comes of it but love...

First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know : the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose. The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience – (said that half a dozen times already).

RIPOSTE Love is like water or the air my townspeople; it cleanses, and dissipates evil gases. It is like poetry too and for the same reasons. Love is so precious my townspeople that if I were you I would have it under lock and key— like the air or the Atlantic or like poetry!

But love love is unworldly, and nothing comes of it but love—following and falling endlessly from her thoughts

Sun benches at the curb bespeak another season, truncated poplars that having served for shade served also later for the fire.

I have always associated [Al Que Quiere!] with a figure on a soccer field: to him who wants the ball to be passed to him. [...] I was convinced nobody in the world of poetry wanted me but I was there willing to pass the ball if anyone did want it.

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! — William Carlos Williams, from "Danse Russe," The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939 , edited by Christopher MacGowan.

Complaint They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one golden needle! I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

papers of various shades sticking out from under others, throwing the printing out of line: portrait of all that which we have lost

Memory is a kind of accomplishment, a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized, of new kinds? since their movements are towards new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned).

The greatness of a poet is not to be measured by the scale but by the intensity and the perfection of his works. Also by his vivacity. Williams is the author of the most vivid poems of modern American poetry.

Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! from "Danse Russe

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

she opened the door! nearly six feet tall, and I . . . wanted to found a new country—

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

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

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

What power has love but forgiveness?

Death will be too late to bring us aid.

What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

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