There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.
William Carlos WilliamsBy listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.
William Carlos WilliamsAnd yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.
William Carlos WilliamsA poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
William Carlos WilliamsPoe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
William Carlos Williams