Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

God and the imagination are one.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

One must have a mind of winter.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Next to love is the desire for love.

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.

There is no wing like meaning

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

Thought tends to collect in pools.

... unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.