Quotes from William Carlos Williams

The Wind Increases The harried earth is swept; the trees; the tulip's bright tips sidle and toss - Loose your love to flow - Blow! Good Christ, what is a poet - if any exists? A man whose words will bite their way home - being actual, having the form of motion at each twigtip upon the tortured body of thought; gripping the ground a way to the last leaftip.

what an angle you make with each other as you lie there in contemplation.

The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark . and lamps are lit, cats prowl and men read, read–or mumble and stare at that which their small lights distinguish or obscure or their hands search out in the dark. The poem moves them or it does not move them. Faitoute, his ears ringing . no sound . no great city, as he seems to read–

Time passes and pisses on us all.

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.

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.

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 .

Up to then, neither Mother nor Pop had any immediate church connections, but used to meet with a few others at spiritualistic seances, sometimes at home, sometimes elsewhere around the block. A prime mover in this form of religious service was old man Demarest, a devout believer. The chief tenet of these earnest persons was that the dead did live as spirits about us and would come or could be called to us at certain times by prayer or otherwise. There were curious consequences.

a crown for her head with castles upon it, skyscrapers filled with nut-chocolates

The language . words without style! whose scholars (there are none) . or dangling, about whom the water weaves its strands encasing them in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged under its flow . Caught (in mind) beside the water he looks down, listens! But discovers, still, no syllable in the confused uproar: missing the sense (though he tries) untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity of his listening .

age and learn to breathe again

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?

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

The same things exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination.

NANTUCKET Flowers through the window lavender and yellow changed by white curtains? Smell of cleanliness? 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

all to no end save beauty the eternal –

The Library is desolation, it has a smell of its own of stagnation and death.

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...

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

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

and that beauty is related not to loveliness but to a state in which reality plays a part

the descent follows the ascent—to wisdom as to despair. A man is under the crassest necessity to break down the pinnacles of his moods fearlessly — to the bases; base! to the screaming dregs, to have known the clean air .

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

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, –