Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags. — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that.… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context,… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you mean.' No,… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love.… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light. — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You're always beginning again. — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I go five steps in the garden, and I immediately lose track of time... it is a kind of joy in being alive in… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
As soon as I could write with a little pencil, I was writing these little hymns and illustrating them, and I thought they should… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
