William Carlos Williams Quote

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William Carlos Williams
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William Carlos Williams

“One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Letter to his mother, written from the University of Pennsylvania (12 February 1904)
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William Carlos Williams

“It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: On his work, in an interview in The New York Herald Tribune (18 January 1932)
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William Carlos Williams

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

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Detail & Prosody for the Poem Patterson given to James Laughlin (1939), now at Houghton Library
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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 had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Letter to James Laughlin (14 January 1944), published in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957) edited by John C. Thirlwall, p. 219
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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

Source/Notes: The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951) [W. W. Norton & Co., 1967, ISBN 978-0811202268]
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William Carlos Williams

“There's a lot of bastards out there!”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: As quoted in the poem "Death News" by Allen Ginsberg
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William Carlos Williams

“I liked this because of the elimination of the essential in the composition. I cut it down and down, and down. This squeezed up to make it vivid.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Annotation on Chicory and Daisies (1915) on John C. Thirlwell's copy of The Collected Earlier Poems (c. 1958)
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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 than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Annotations on John C. Thirlwell's copy of The Collected Earlier Poems (c. 1958)
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William Carlos Williams

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

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: As quoted in Free Verse.Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 2nd ed (1975)
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William Carlos Williams

“So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Poetry Chicago, 1916) - Marriage (1916)
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William Carlos Williams

“Lift your flowers on bitter stems chickory! Lift them up out of the scorched ground! Bear no foliage but give yourself wholly to that! Strain under them you bitter stems that no beast eats — and scorn greyness!”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Chicory and Daisies - Al Que Quiere! (1917)
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William Carlos Williams

“The earth cracks and is shriveled up; the wind moans piteously; the sky goes out if you should fail.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Chicory and Daisies - Al Que Quiere! (1917)
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William Carlos Williams

“Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers— old and experienced— returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Al Que Quiere! (1917)
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William Carlos Williams

“the set pieces of your faces stir me — leading citizens — but not in the same way.”

- William Carlos Williams

Source/Notes: Al Que Quiere! (1917)
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