Poetry is the scholar’s art.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.

A poem is a meteor.

The mind can never be satisfied.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon …

There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The lightIn the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snowAt the end of winter when afternoons return.Pink...

The House Was Quiet and the World Was CalmThe house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house...

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

It was soldier’s went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was spring and the birds had to come,No doubt that soldier’s had to be marching,and that the drums had to...

The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the...

The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run before him,Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him,Arching cloths besprinkled with...

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe...

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination,Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did...

The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.These two things are one.

I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.

One must read poetry with one’s nerves.

Children picking up our bonesWill never know that these were onceAs quick as foxes on the hill;