The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree. (from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')
Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.
I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the po...
We have never understood how birds manage to fly, Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams, Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.
Till her appointed course be run; Till on the darkness faint her breath Flown to the silent void, and Death Sit crowned upon the ashen sun. (“The Testimony of the Suns”)
Where got she her sullen mouth And where her swaying form? Would she live on eggs and apples When the blood of men is warm? (“The Young Witch”)
The pathway traced with blood and tears, and dust of all our father's dead, Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red, Fade to the mist of nameless years. (“The Testimony of the Suns”)
Within its gates I heard the sound Of winds in cypress caverns caught Of huddling tress that moaned, and sought To whisper what their roots had found. (“A Dream of Fear”)
O Space and Time and stars at strife, How dreadful your infinity! Shrined by your termless trinity, How strange, how terrible, is life! (“The Testimony of the Suns”)
I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught
life is first boredom, then fear. whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then the only end of age.
Though the body is its genesis, a poem is the vision of a process Carved in space, vision your poor eye's single armor against winter spring summer fall
When the words have been said and the music has been played, feelings are the only form of art which will remain to reign.
Beautiful feelings soar freely, while true care roots deeply. Real love can only be defined by them both.
There are things we do that the human mind doesn't understand, yet the same things are meant for the heart to fully comprehend.
When the words have been said and the music has been played, feelings are the only form of art which will remain to reign. (Soar)
I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though “he was full of ideas.” “My dear Degas,” Mallarmé responded, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words.
Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville. Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town.
