Quote collection
79 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In an age of abstract experience, fornication Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria, And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients; Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule, Are precious."
"I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it."
"Now remember courage, go to the door,Open it and see whether coiled on the bedOr cringing by the wall, a savage beastMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyesLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floorWill snarl-and man can never be alone."
"Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down You had not seen take amber light alive."
"Good manners, Madam, are had these days not For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's. The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot."
"Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet."
"Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red Reverberance of hail upon the dead Thunder like an exploding crucible!"
"We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate."
"I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?"
"Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for."
"Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results."
"A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all."
"I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me."
"I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure."
"At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary."
"Men cannot live forever But they must die forever."
"What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why."
"Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it."
"Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy."