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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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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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I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
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Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.
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We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
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We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
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A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
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We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
Edward Dahlberg
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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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Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
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Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
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Every decision you make is a mistake.
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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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Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man he was certainly a drumbling one.
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What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
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The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
Edward Dahlberg
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Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
Edward Dahlberg
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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.
Edward Dahlberg
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Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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