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Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

William Carlos Williams

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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
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Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
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Prose
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More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
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The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned
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Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!
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Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.
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we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.
William Carlos Williams
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Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them
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Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.
William Carlos Williams
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Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.
William Carlos Williams
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Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.
William Carlos Williams
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Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
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Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.
William Carlos Williams
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What power has love but forgiveness?
William Carlos Williams
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I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.
William Carlos Williams
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It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
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In summer, the song sings itself.
William Carlos Williams
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Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
William Carlos Williams
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But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
William Carlos Williams
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The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.
William Carlos Williams
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But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
William Carlos Williams
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Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
William Carlos Williams