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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

Edward Dahlberg

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Edward Dahlberg
Age: 76 †
Born: 1900
Born: July 22
Died: 1977
Died: February 27
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Toady
Mimicking
Poetic
Poet
Nature

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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
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Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.
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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
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Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
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A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
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The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.
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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.
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What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.
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A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
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There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
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Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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