The Collected Earlier Poems Quotes

“Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city—
flying apart at his approaches”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“If you are not already too blind
too deaf, too lost in the past
to know or to care—
I will write a book about you—
making you live (in a book!)
as you still desperately
want to live—
to live always—unforgiving”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“It is as though
you looked down from above
at me—not
with what they would describe
as pride but the same
that is in me: a sort
of shame that the world
should see you as I see you,
a somewhat infantile creature—
without subtlety—
defenseless.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“Ah, Madam, what good are your thoughts

romantic but true
beside this gaiety of the sun
and that huge appetite?

Look!
from a glass pitcher she serves
clear water to the white chickens.

What are your memories
beside that purity?”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“Unworldly love
that has no hope
                  of the world

                  and that
cannot change the world
to its delight—

        The rain
falls upon the earth
and grass and flowers

come
      perfectly

into form from its
                    liquid

clearness

          But love is
unworldly

          and nothing
comes of it but love”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“—she
opened the door! nearly
six feet tall, and I . . .
wanted to found a new country—”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“perhaps it is all art
and Barnum our one genius (in the arts)
on the moral plane”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems

“Sweep the house clean
here is one who has gone up
(though problematically)
to heaven, blindly
by force of the facts-
a clean sweep
is one way of expressing it-”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems