A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
The realist always falls in love with a girl he has grown up with, the romanticist with a girl from ’off somewhere.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. –.
My definition of literature would be just this: words that have become deeds.
I sha’n’t catch up in this world, anyway. I’d rather you’d not go unless you must.
Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
Though we choose greatly, still to lack The lasting memory at all clear, That life has for us on the wrack Nothing but what we somehow chose; Thus are we wholly stripped of pride In the pain that has but one close, Bearing it crushed and mystified.
All thought is a feat of association.
But all We did that day was mingle great and small Footprints in summer dust as if we drew The figure of our being less than two But more than one as yet.
We go to school to learn what books to read for the rest of our lives.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall that sends the frozen ground swell under it.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I’d name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi... Leonard Bacon... but it is still too early to assertions. They’re all ‘in the field.’ It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both...
Spare me the setting of my fate to music.
I won’t have it, in poetry, that bulk counts. People say to me, ‘Now settle down and do a long work, since you have shown the public that you can produce beautiful short poetry.’ And their implication tells me that making two verses or a short poem does not satisfy their concept of what an accomplished poet should be able to do. Bulk they want, as evidence of a man’s power.
Monotony? Have we not always had the same stars and the same sky above us, changing only in its shades of blue and gray and purple black? And who shall say that such themes are exhausted? Have we not always had love and passion, war and peace, summer and winter and spring and fall with us? And are these things unable longer to impel us to spiritual variations?
I am for the artist, who is more alone than he looks. I am not for the reformer, who is always active but usually has nothing to give. The real thing that you do is a lonely thing. And remember the paradox that you become more social in order that you may become more of an individual.
As that I can see no way out but through –.
Nature is cruel; it’s man whose is sick of blood– and man doesn’t seem so very sick of it...