Quote

One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.

William Carlos Williams

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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Begin
Awaken
Quickens
Objects
Leafs
Outline
Upon
Leaf
Entrance
Stills
Rooted
Starks
Change
Clarity
Stark
Still
Defined
Entrances
Come
Profound
Outlines
Dignity
Grip

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Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.
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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
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We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.
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Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.
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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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The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
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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.
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As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world
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I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.
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Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
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The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.
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It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you
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Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.
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There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
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I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!
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History must stay open, it is all humanity.
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Death will be too late to bring us aid.
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The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.
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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.
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Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.
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