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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Disorder
Eternal
Poetry
Words
Beautiful
Virginity
Overwhelmed

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
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In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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