Literature and Words

They write about it.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

A word after a word after a word is power.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— you can’t plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out “I am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry.

Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence— It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something. The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life.

It is a true error to marry with poets or to be by them.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper

The poet is a little god.

The matters I relate Are true lies. 3

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe. 9

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.

It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. “And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.”

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!

His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles.

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.