William Carlos Williams - Language Quotes

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We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

William Carlos Williams

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

William Carlos Williams

There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.
It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else.

William Carlos Williams

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

William Carlos Williams