William Everson > Quotes

“The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist.”
― William Everson, The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure

“Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.”
― William Everson, Earth Poetry: Selected Essays and Interviews, 1950-1977

“Art is not the handmaid of politics. It is its own remedy! And its healing is sacral.”
― William Everson, Naked Heart: Selected Interviews

“A poem is contained movement. ”
― William Everson, Prodigious Thrust

“Few things contain and impact the immediacy of cultural impress so evocatively as books, and not only through their ideas. A book is an artifact, and every age establishes upon the basic functional structure its own particular stamp.”
― William Everson, Prodigious Thrust

“One of the deepest needs of the human soul is for centeredness . . . which confers meaning on the shapelessness of temporal existence.”
― William Everson, Earth Poetry: Selected Essays and Interviews, 1950-1977

“Fascism is an attempt to forge a bond between an historical sacral culture with its roots in the past, and an emergent pluralist mentality not yet thoroughly formalized in a living tradition.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury

“Dawn and a high film; the sun burned it;
But noon had a thick sheet, and the clouds coming,
The low rain-bringers, trooping in from the north,
From the far cold fog-breeding seas, the womb of storms.
Dusk brought a wind and the sky opened:
All down the west the broken strips lay snared in the light,
Bellied and humped and heaped on the hills.
The set sun threw the blaze up;
The sky lived redly, banner on banner of far-burning flame,
From south to north the furnace door wide and the smoke rolling.
We in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope,
Facing the west, facing the bright sky, hopelessly longing to know
the red beauty--
But the unable eyes, the too-small intelligence,
The insufficient organs of reception
Not a thousandth part enough to take and retain.
We stared, and no speaking. and felt the deep loneness
of incomprehension.
The flesh must turn cloud, the spirit, air,
Transformation to sky and the burning,
Absolute oneness with the west and the down sun.
But we, being earth-stuck, watched from the fields,
Till the rising rim shut out the light;
Till the sky changed, the long wounds healed;
Till the rain fell.”
― William Everson, The Residual Years: Poems, 1934-1948: Including a Selection of Uncollected and Previously Unpublished Poems

“Heinrich Zimmer: 'Myth is the sole and spontaneous image of life itself in its flowing harmony and mutually hostile contrarieties, in all the polyphony and harmony of their contradictions.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury

“To live one's myth is to think in its terms.
To fulfill one's myth is to suffer through its source.”
― William Everson, The Engendering Flood: Book One of Dust Shall Be the Serpent's Food (Cantos I-IV)

“Then all meaning was in the group . . . today . . . all is in the individual.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury

“The myth disregards — does not know — the individual.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury

“It is in the order of the imagination, the order of poetry, that the possible exceeds itself, is sanctified in excess.”
― William Everson, Earth Poetry: Selected Essays and Interviews, 1950-1977

“For the mind of every man is balanced upon the creative tension within him of conceptual mediation between the opposed polarities of the finite and the infinite, the essential and the existential. the exact equation between them is responsible for the basic human types, which, in aesthetics, constitute the classical and the romantic temperaments.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury

“Nietzsche: 'myth itself is a kind or style of thinking. It imparts an idea of the universe, but does it in the sequence of events, actions, sufferings.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury

“The anthropocentric version of the God of Christianity will not avail. . . . Instead emerges a new hero, a new messiah, a new superman. He will seek to weld all together in a terrible act of unbelievable affirmation beyond the limits of common human desire, beyond common hope. He will free himself through the ancient acts of violation — fornication, incest, rape. . . . His name is the Rev. Dr. Arthur Barclay.”
― William Everson, Robinson Jeffers Fragments of an Older Fury