Quotes by W. S. Merwin - Page 2

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Heard
Resonance
Origins
Poem
Teaches
Copy Quote
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Distance
Memories
Missing
Copy Quote
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Imagine
Importance
Paper
Prose
Scrap
Useless
Typewriter
Tried
Copy Quote
You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Arbitrary
Pushing
Relentless
Attached
Promises
Copy Quote
This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Fall
Moon
Rain
Copy Quote
When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you mean.' No, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Can't Change
Mean
Moving
Copy Quote
I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Thinking
Trying
World
Copy Quote
I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Conscious
Grace
Shame
Silence
Welcome
Expressing
Occasion
Openly
Copy Quote
The Indians seemed to be living in a place and in a way that was of immense importance to me. So I associate learning to read - English, oddly enough - with wanting to know about Indians. I'm still growing into it. I've never outgrown that.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Immense
Associate
Indians
Oddly
Copy Quote
I think this is one of the benefits of getting older: that one has that perspective on things farther away. One is so caught up in middle years in the idea of accomplishing something when, in fact, the full accomplishment is always with one.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Caught
Getting Older
Accomplishing
Farther
Copy Quote
Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Dark
Echoes
Night
Copy Quote
There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Attention
Needs
Pay
Copy Quote
The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Formality
Ordinary
Exchange
Copy Quote
To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Mouths
Way
Who We Are
Copy Quote
The Arab world is erupting, which is extraordinary, and to see it happen is like watching rings spreading on a pool - it goes out; it varies so much. The spontaneity is wonderful, but very often, if it's not well organized, it breaks up, and it peters out.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Arab World
Organized
Pool
Rings
Spontaneity
Arab
Breaks
Spreading
Varies
Copy Quote
I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Knowing
Said
Writing
Copy Quote
But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Good Love
Political
Writing
Copy Quote
Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Art
Simple
Thinking
Copy Quote
What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Attitude
Believe
Hopeful
Copy Quote
I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Hard Times
Rest Of Life
Tolls
Copy Quote
The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Discovering
Flow
One Minute
Predict
Copy Quote
If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
War
Hate
Ideas
Copy Quote
The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Government
Past
People
Copy Quote
We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of - as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that - it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Dark
Faces
Guides
Light
Mystery
Our Lives
Shadow
Unknown
Talk
Behind
Side
Copy Quote
The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in...
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Ideas
Long
People
Copy Quote
The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Rain
Rivers
Sea
Copy Quote
Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous... I don't think this helps us to survive... We're very species-centric... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Children
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward'... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Bird
Cells
Pyramids
Copy Quote
There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Believe
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Running
Attitude
Book
Copy Quote
I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Country
Moving
Thinking
Copy Quote
Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Design
Garden
Thinking
Copy Quote
In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Garden
Rain
Rivers
Copy Quote
The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.
W. S. Merwin / Poet
Caring
Mean
Writing
Copy Quote

Related Poet Authors

William Blake
Poet
Monday, Nov 28, 1757
Sunday, Aug 12, 1827
Walt Whitman
Poet
Monday, May 31, 1819
Saturday, Mar 26, 1892
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 21, 1772
Friday, Jul 25, 1834
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Poet
Zoe Whittall
Poet
Monday, Feb 16, 1976
Zbigniew Herbert
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 29, 1924
Tuesday, Jul 28, 1998
Yvor Winters
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 17, 1900
Thursday, Jan 25, 1968
Yvonne Zipter
Poet
Yusef Komunyakaa
Poet
Tuesday, Apr 29, 1947
Yunus Emre
Poet
Yosa Buson
Poet

Thursday, Dec 25, 1783
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Poet
Monday, Jul 18, 1932
Saturday, Apr 01, 2017
Yevgeny Baratynsky
Poet
Sunday, Mar 02, 1800
Thursday, Jul 11, 1844

View All Poet Quotes

Top Authors

George Carlin
Comedian
Wednesday, May 12, 1937
Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Poet
Saturday, Aug 05, 1809
Thursday, Oct 06, 1892
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Albert Camus
Author
Friday, Nov 07, 1913
Monday, Jan 04, 1960
Mae West
Actress
Thursday, Aug 17, 1893
Saturday, Nov 22, 1980
Paulo Coelho
Lyricist
Sunday, Aug 24, 1947
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34Th U.s. President
Tuesday, Oct 14, 1890
Friday, Mar 28, 1969
Plato
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
John C. Maxwell
Author
Thursday, Feb 20, 1947
Will Rogers
Actor
Tuesday, Nov 04, 1879
Thursday, Aug 15, 1935
Billy Graham
Evangelist
Thursday, Nov 07, 1918
Jean De La Bruyere
Wednesday, Aug 16, 1645
Thursday, May 10, 1696
Charles Spurgeon
Preacher
Thursday, Jun 19, 1834
Sunday, Jan 31, 1892
Rodney Dangerfield
Comedian
Tuesday, Nov 22, 1921
Tuesday, Oct 05, 2004
Helen Keller
Author
Sunday, Jun 27, 1880
Saturday, Jun 01, 1968

View All Authors

W. S. Merwin Quotes - Page 2

App & Tools

Related Poet Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Poet Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page