Daily Digest

“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”

“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.”

“A poem is a meteor.”

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”

“Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.”

“Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.”

“I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.”

“What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.”

“The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm The 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 was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”

“New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.”

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

“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”

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

“The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.”

“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”

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

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

“The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-eggs. The threads Will abash him. Third Girl Oh, la...le pauvre! I shall run before him, With a curious puffing. He will bend his ear then. I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals. It will undo him.”

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

“If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.”

“After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun.”

“Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!”

“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

“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.”

“Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.”

“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain There 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 dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.”

“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.”

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

“After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.”

“The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.”

“The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

“Poetry is the scholar's art.”

“There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.”

“If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.”

“Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.”

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

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

“The fire burns as the novel taught it how.”

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

“The poet is the priest of the invisible.”

“I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.”

“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.”

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”