Richard Wilbur Quotes

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray.

Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.

There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

What's lightly hid is deepest understood.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.