It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.
The function of posterity is to look after itself.
The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.
In the beginning was the word, the word That from the solid bases of the light Abstracted all the letters of the void...
Hands have not tears to flow.
A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill’s shoulder.
The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be “comic” about it.
I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.
Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
Washington isn’t a city, it’s an abstraction.
Let the dry eyes perceive Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.
Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.
To begin, at the beginning...
Man’s wants remain unsatisfied till death. Then, when his soul is naked, is he one With the man in the wind, and the west moon, With the harmonious thunder of the sun.
The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
I sang in my chains like the sea.
I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.
I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.
The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.
Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels...