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Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes.

W. S. Merwin

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W. S. Merwin
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: September 30
Died: 2019
Died: March 15
Poet
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
William Stanley Merwin
Anyone
Expecting
Simple
Poem
Makes
Touch
Art
Demand
Work
However
Long
Wants
Thinking
Takes
Stop
Genuinely

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
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Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way
W. S. Merwin
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On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W. S. Merwin
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
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I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
W. S. Merwin
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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
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But most love poetry is awful nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
W. S. Merwin
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I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
W. S. Merwin
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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
W. S. Merwin
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I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
W. S. Merwin
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Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W. S. Merwin
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If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.
W. S. Merwin
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After an age of leaves and feathers someone dead thought of the mountain as money and cut the trees that were here and the wind and the rain at night. It is hard to say it.
W. S. Merwin
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Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.
W. S. Merwin
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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W. S. Merwin
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We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
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We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.
W. S. Merwin
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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
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Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
W. S. Merwin
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My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin