Poetry Quotes by William Carlos Williams

“It is at the edge of the petal that love waits”

— William Carlos Williams

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

— William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

“The poet thinks with his poem...”

— William Carlos Williams

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

— William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small machine made of words.

— William Carlos Williams

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

— William Carlos Williams

“The Hurricane The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.”

— William Carlos Williams

“The pure products of America go crazy... ...[] No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car”

— 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

“unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning”

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

— William Carlos Williams

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

— William Carlos Williams

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

— William Carlos Williams

“You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been…

— 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…

— William Carlos Williams

“Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet…

— William Carlos Williams

“I have always associated [Al Que Quiere!] with a figure on a soccer field: to him who wants the ball to be…

— William Carlos Williams

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man…

— William Carlos Williams

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do…

— William Carlos Williams

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

— William Carlos Williams

I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better…

— 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…

— William Carlos Williams

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the…

— 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…

— William Carlos Williams

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by…

— William Carlos Williams

I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak…

— William Carlos Williams

“What do they mean when they say: “I do not like your poems; you have no faith whatever. You seem neither to…

— 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

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

— William Carlos Williams

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a…

— 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

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

“The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech-- is, of…

— William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait,…

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

“I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little…

— William Carlos Williams

The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient… When asked, how I have for so many years continued an…

— William Carlos Williams