Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky And I must think a little of the past: When I was ten I told a stinking lie That got a black boy whipped.
Death's long anabasis.
Men expect too much, do too little.
The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
My darling boy whom I shall never know, My son, I love you in my deepest fears.
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.
Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins; when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.
I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me.
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit In late December before the fire's daze Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.
The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail; Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark; and then the towering weak and pale.
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.
Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.
The torrent of the reaching shade Broke shadow into all its parts, What then had been of shadow made Found exigence in fits and starts.
Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Peering, I heard the hooves come down the hill. The posse passed, twelve horse; the leader's face Was worn as limestone on an ancient sill.
Our loss put six feet under ground Is measured by the magnolia's root; Our gain's the intellectual sound Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.
