The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?
And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.
Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.
Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?
Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.
There is only one po- sition for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.
Reading one’s own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet’s tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.
Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.
Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.
I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.
A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bend by the same wintry fever.
A good poem is a contribution to reality.
But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything – you wouldn’t think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night...
Shall I let in the stranger, Shall I welcome the sailor, Or stay till the day I die? Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships, Hold you poison or grapes?