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The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.

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
Pure
Deaf
Crazy
Thieves
Ends
Valleys
America
Lakes
Ribbed
North
Isolate
Folks
Kentucky
Mountain
Jersey
Products
Folk

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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.
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O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.
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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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[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
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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.
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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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Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
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To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?
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Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
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The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
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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.
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Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
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A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.
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What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
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My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
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Being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
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I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.
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Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.
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I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
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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.
William Carlos Williams