Richard Wilbur Quotations

That's what (Hill) died for, the right for people to protest. But I don't think a funeral is the right place or context in the way they are protesting. It's not something the family needs to hear, that we're glad your son's dead and that your minister is a whore.

To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose, And found the people incomplete

Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

Most women know that sex isgood for headaches.

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

We know what boredom is: it is a dull Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do. In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light

The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.

It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best - unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.

What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out.

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

What's lightly hid is deepest understood,

What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?

Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray...