William Carlos Williams Quotes

William Carlos Williams shares blunt, restless verses on poetry and life that feel like a fierce, questioning shout.

36 quotes

1. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

2. What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. We know the plane will crash, the train be derailed. And we know why. No one cares, no one can care. We get the news and discount it, we are quite right in doing so. It is trivial. But the haunted news I get from some obscure patient's eyes is not trivial. It is profound.

3. The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but 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.

4. There's a lot of bastards out there!

5. 'Love Song' from Al Que Quiere! (1917)

6. 'Danse Russe' (1917) from Al Que Qiuere! (1917)

7. 'El Hombre' from Al Que Quiere! (1917)

8. 'The Great Figure' from Sour Grapes (1921)

9. 'To Awaken an Old Lady,' The Dial (August 1920), later published in Sour Grapes (1921)

10. 'The Red Wheelbarrow' from Spring and All (1923)

11. 'Spring and All' from Spring and All (1923)

12. 'To Elsie' from Spring and All (1923)

13. 'This Is Just to Say' from Collected Poems 1921-1931 (1934)

14. 'Death' from Collected Poems 1921-1931 (1934)

15. 'Impromptu: The Suckers' from Collected Poems 1921-1931 (1934)

16. 'The Locust Tree in Flower' from An Early Martyr (1935)

17. 'These' from Complete Collected Poems (1938)

18. 'Raleigh Was Right' (1940) from Collected Later Poems (1950)

19. 'A Sort of a Song' from The Wedge (1944)

20. 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,' Book I from Journey to Love (1955)

21. Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

22. What power has love but forgiveness?

23. I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

24. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

25. Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

26. A new music is a new mind.

27. A new world is only a new mind.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

31. 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.

32. There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

33. Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

34. through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.

35. THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

36. It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.