Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the dark ahead. I knew that they were the eyes of a cow–a poor dear stoic old cow with a cud, standing on the highway shoulder, for there wasn't any...
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. I...
Season late, day late, sun just down, and the skyCold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,From water the color of sky except whereHer motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silve...
What is man but his passion?
I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-fiv...
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something(All The King's Men)
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Li...
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, i...
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end the poem is not a thing we see - it is rather a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.