William Carlos Williams - Poem Quotes

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It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams
When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

William Carlos Williams
The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

William Carlos Williams
My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. … it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

William Carlos Williams
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made of words...Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

William Carlos Williams
There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.

William Carlos Williams
The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.

William Carlos Williams