A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man. |
A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit, / Dumb / As old medallions to the thumb . . . / A poem should be equal to / Not true . . . / A poem should not mean / But be. |
A poem should not mean, But be |
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off. |
A world ends when its metaphor has died |
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them. |
And there, there overhead, there hung over Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, There in the starless dark the poise, the hover, There with vast wings across the cancelled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall, Of nothing, |
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words. |
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold. |
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. |
I think you have to deal with the confused situation that we're faced with by seizing on the glimpses and particles of life, seizing on them and holding them and trying to make a pattern of them. In other words, trying to put a world back together again out of its fragmentary moments. |
It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be. |
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world. |
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there. |
Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. |