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“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”
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“The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.”
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“What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."
[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]”
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[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]”
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“Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.”
― Collected Poems, 1917-1982
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.”
― Collected Poems, 1917-1982
“Around, around the sun we go:
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.”
― Collected Poems, 1917-1982
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.”
― Collected Poems, 1917-1982
“Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.”
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“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”
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“There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.”
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There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.”
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“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
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“Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.”
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“If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.”
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“And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night”
― Collected Poems, 1917-1982
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night”
― Collected Poems, 1917-1982
“How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.”
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“You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any...there is only love." - J.B's wife”
― J.B.: A Play in Verse
― J.B.: A Play in Verse
“Epistle to Be Left in the Earth
...It is colder now,
There are many stars,
We are drifting
North by the Great Bear,
The leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks,
To southward
Red sun grey air:
The crows are
Slow on their crooked wings,
The jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion.
Each man believes in his heart he will die.
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.
None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.
We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you,
You (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.
I will tell you all we have learned,
I will tell you everything:
The earth is round,
There are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,
Beware of
Elms in thunder,
The lights in the sky are stars—
We think they do not see,
We think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.
Do not listen.
Do not stand at dark in the open windows.
We before you have heard this:
They are voices:
They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(...We have thought often
The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.
It is very cold,
There are strange stars near Arcturus,
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky”
― New Found Land
...It is colder now,
There are many stars,
We are drifting
North by the Great Bear,
The leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks,
To southward
Red sun grey air:
The crows are
Slow on their crooked wings,
The jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion.
Each man believes in his heart he will die.
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.
None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.
We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you,
You (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.
I will tell you all we have learned,
I will tell you everything:
The earth is round,
There are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,
Beware of
Elms in thunder,
The lights in the sky are stars—
We think they do not see,
We think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.
Do not listen.
Do not stand at dark in the open windows.
We before you have heard this:
They are voices:
They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(...We have thought often
The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.
It is very cold,
There are strange stars near Arcturus,
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky”
― New Found Land
“When one expects to go on "forever" as one does in one's youth or even middle age, horizons are merely limits, not yet ends. It is when one first sees the horizon as an end that one first begins to see.”
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“A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.”
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“When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...
Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."
But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...
The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...
The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...”
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Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."
But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...
The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...
The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...”
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“The first discipline is the realization that there is a discipline—-that all art begins and ends with discipline, that any art is first and foremost a craft. We have gone far enough on the road to self-indulgence now to know that. The man who announces to the world that he is going to “do his thing” is like the amateur on the high-diving platform who flings himself into the void shouting at the judges that he is going to do whatever comes naturally. He will land on his ass. Naturally. You’d think, to listen to the loudspeakers that surround us, that no man had ever tried to “do his thing” before. Every poet worth reading has, but those really worth reading have understood that to do your thing you have to learn first what your thing is and second how to go about doing it.”
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“We knock upon silence for an answering music.”
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“If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd....”
― J.B.: A Play in Verse
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd....”
― J.B.: A Play in Verse
“To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways..." (The Rape Of The Swan)
Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.”
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Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.”
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“As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief... without moral purpose or human interest.”
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“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
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“Speech to a Crowd
Tell me, my patient friends, awaiters of messages.
From what other shore, from what stranger,
Whence, was the word to come? Who was to lesson you?
Listeners under a child’s crib in a manger,
Listeners once by the oracles, now by the transoms,
Whom are you waiting for? Who do you think will explain?
Listeners thousands of years and still no answer—
Writers at night to Miss Lonely-Hearts, awkward spellers,
Open your eyes! There is only earth and the man!
There is only you. There is no one else on the telephone:
No one else is on the air to whisper:
No one else but you will push the bell.
No one knows if you don’t: neither ships
Nor landing-fields decode the dark between.
You have your eyes and what your eyes see, is.
The earth you see is really the earth you are seeing.
The sun is truly excellent, truly warm,
Women are beautiful as you have seen them—
Their breasts (believe it) like cooing of doves in a portico.
They bear at their breasts tenderness softly. Look at them!
Look at yourselves. You are strong. You are well formed.
Look at the world—the world you never took!
It is really true you may live in the world heedlessly.
Why do you wait to read it in a book then?
Write it yourselves! Write to yourselves if you need to!
Tell yourselves there is sun and the sun will rise.
Tell yourselves the earth has food to feed you.
Let the dead men say that men must die!
Who better than you can know what death is?
How can a bone or a broken body surmise it?
Let the dead shriek with their whispering breath.
Laugh at them! Say the murdered gods may wake
But we who work have end of work together.
Tell yourselves the earth is yours to take!
Waiting for messages out of the dark you were poor.
The world was always yours: you would not take it.”
― New Found Land
Tell me, my patient friends, awaiters of messages.
From what other shore, from what stranger,
Whence, was the word to come? Who was to lesson you?
Listeners under a child’s crib in a manger,
Listeners once by the oracles, now by the transoms,
Whom are you waiting for? Who do you think will explain?
Listeners thousands of years and still no answer—
Writers at night to Miss Lonely-Hearts, awkward spellers,
Open your eyes! There is only earth and the man!
There is only you. There is no one else on the telephone:
No one else is on the air to whisper:
No one else but you will push the bell.
No one knows if you don’t: neither ships
Nor landing-fields decode the dark between.
You have your eyes and what your eyes see, is.
The earth you see is really the earth you are seeing.
The sun is truly excellent, truly warm,
Women are beautiful as you have seen them—
Their breasts (believe it) like cooing of doves in a portico.
They bear at their breasts tenderness softly. Look at them!
Look at yourselves. You are strong. You are well formed.
Look at the world—the world you never took!
It is really true you may live in the world heedlessly.
Why do you wait to read it in a book then?
Write it yourselves! Write to yourselves if you need to!
Tell yourselves there is sun and the sun will rise.
Tell yourselves the earth has food to feed you.
Let the dead men say that men must die!
Who better than you can know what death is?
How can a bone or a broken body surmise it?
Let the dead shriek with their whispering breath.
Laugh at them! Say the murdered gods may wake
But we who work have end of work together.
Tell yourselves the earth is yours to take!
Waiting for messages out of the dark you were poor.
The world was always yours: you would not take it.”
― New Found Land
“. . . At Ghent the wind rose.
There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag
Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows
Over fresh water when the waves lag
Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain . . .”
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There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag
Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows
Over fresh water when the waves lag
Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain . . .”
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“You wanted justice and there was none- only love.”
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“Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else.”
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“American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.”
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