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 in it willingly.
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after.
The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.
The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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.
A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.
The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
He heard her low accord,Half prayer and half ditty,And He felt a subtle quiver,That was not heavenly love,Or pity.This is not writIn any book.
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 be rolling, rolling, rolling
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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
From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.It is in this solitude, a syllable,Out of these gawky flitterings,Intones its single emptiness,The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon …
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.