Spring and All Quotes

“It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“If anything of the moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round you –”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“It lives as pictures only can : by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky...”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“To hell with you and your poetry —
You will rot and be blown
through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases —”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself - sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion-
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning-”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Black wind, I have poured my heart out
to you until I am sick of it-

Now I run my hand over you feeling
the play of your body - the quiver
of it's strength-”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.”
― William Carlos WIlliams, Spring and All

“First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know : the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose.

The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience – (said that half a dozen times already).”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences "freshly and with the appearance of reality" –
This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“...and that beauty is related not to loveliness but to a state in which reality plays a part”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“a crown for her head with
castles upon it, skyscrapers
filled with nut-chocolates”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“But though I have felt "free" only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position.
So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it - It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but -

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose : to clarity to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not acurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist - Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment -

Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystalization of the imagination - the perfection of new forms as addition to nature - Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry -

Is what I have written prose ? The only answer is that form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated - If that power to go on falters in the middle of a sentence - that is the end of the sentence - Or if a new phase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“The sea that encloses her young. body
ula lu la lu
is the sea of many arms -

The blazing secrecy of noon is undone
and and and
the broken sand is the sound of love -”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination.

prose : statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts - technical expositions, jargon of all sorts - fictional and other -

poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it — It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but —As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All