110+ William Carlos Williams Quotes On Poetry, Imaginative And Evocative

William Carlos Williams was an American poet and physician from Rutherford, New Jersey. He was a leader of the Imagist Movement, which focused on clarity and precision of language, and wrote poems that were accessible and modern. His works include the long poem Paterson, the short poem "The Red Wheelbarrow", and the famous poem "This Is Just to Say". Following is our collection on famous quotes by William Carlos Williams on poetry, imaginative, evocative.

Top 10 William Carlos Williams Quotes

1. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
2. As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.
3. My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.
4. It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
5. There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
6. Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.
7. In summer, the song sings itself.
8. so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
9. [History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
10. Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.

William Carlos Williams Short Quotes

• A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
• The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
• Empty pockets make empty heads.
• What power has love but forgiveness?
• My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
• All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
• No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
• History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
• It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.
• Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

William Carlos Williams Quotes About Poetry

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents. — William Carlos Williams

I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way — William Carlos Williams

I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry. — William Carlos Williams

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard. — William Carlos Williams

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. — William Carlos Williams

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety. — William Carlos Williams

There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that. — William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams Quotes About Imaginative

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses. — William Carlos Williams

By 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 Williams

The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew. — William Carlos Williams

The only realism in art is of the imagination. — William Carlos Williams

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination. — William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams Quotes About Words

The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing. — William Carlos Williams

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? — William Carlos Williams

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions. — William Carlos Williams

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated — William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. — William Carlos Williams

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles. — William Carlos Williams

There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. — William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small machine made of words. — William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. — William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams Famous Quotes And Sayings

One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect. — William Carlos Williams

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale. — William Carlos Williams

It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements — William Carlos Williams

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission. — William Carlos Williams

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness — William Carlos Williams

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound. — William Carlos Williams

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part. — William Carlos Williams

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of — William Carlos Williams

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. — William Carlos Williams

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts. — William Carlos Williams

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. — William Carlos Williams

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. — William Carlos Williams

The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field. — William Carlos Williams

When I am alone I am happy. — William Carlos Williams

Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light! — William Carlos Williams

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated. — William Carlos Williams

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities. — William Carlos Williams

If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household? — William Carlos Williams

For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible. — William Carlos Williams

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion. — William Carlos Williams

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. — William Carlos Williams

No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps. — William Carlos Williams

Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city. — William Carlos Williams

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi. — William Carlos Williams

Practical to the end, it is the poem of his existence that triumphed finally;... — William Carlos Williams

Their story, yours and mine -- it — William Carlos Williams

O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity. — William Carlos Williams

A new world is only a new mind. — William Carlos Williams

Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in? — William Carlos Williams

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow — William Carlos Williams

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned — William Carlos Williams

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time. — William Carlos Williams

We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech. — William Carlos Williams

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak. — William Carlos Williams

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth. — William Carlos Williams

I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it. — William Carlos Williams

Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. — William Carlos Williams

Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight! — William Carlos Williams

I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary. — William Carlos Williams

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide. — William Carlos Williams

And 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 Williams

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken. — William Carlos Williams

No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams

O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind. — William Carlos Williams

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 Williams

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages. — William Carlos Williams

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together. — William Carlos Williams

Time is a storm in which we are all lost. — William Carlos Williams

I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage! — William Carlos Williams

The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past. — William Carlos Williams

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies. — William Carlos Williams

One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken. — William Carlos Williams

THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night. — William Carlos Williams

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels. — William Carlos Williams

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky. — William Carlos Williams

and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away. — William Carlos Williams

Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home. — William Carlos Williams

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze. — William Carlos Williams

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again — William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind. — William Carlos Williams

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules. — William Carlos Williams

To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do? — William Carlos Williams

the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way. — William Carlos Williams

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish — William Carlos Williams

Their time past, pulled down cracked and flung to the fire go up in a roar All recognition lost, burnt clean clean in the flame, the green dispersed, a living red, flame red, red as blood wakes on the ash-- — William Carlos Williams

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination. — William Carlos Williams

Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr. — William Carlos Williams

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention. — William Carlos Williams

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love. — William Carlos Williams

Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss. — William Carlos Williams

A new music is a new mind. — William Carlos Williams

Death will be too late to bring us aid. — William Carlos Williams

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem. — William Carlos Williams

Life Lessons by William Carlos Williams

1. William Carlos Williams emphasizes the importance of cherishing the small moments in life, and encourages readers to appreciate the beauty of the everyday.
2. He also encourages readers to explore their own creativity and to express themselves through art and literature.
3. Finally, Williams encourages readers to be mindful of their own mortality and to live life to the fullest.