Poets From The United States

"I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone."

"I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves."

"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags, Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins."

"One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."

"If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money."

"The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices."

"I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled — Hegel and his avatars — were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there."

"there are more things twixt the vermiform appendix and nirvana than are dreamt of in thy philosophy horatio"

"well well boss there is something to be said for the lyric and imperial attitude believe that everything is for you until you discover that you are for it sing your faith in what you get to eat right up to the minute you are eaten for you are going to be eaten"

"how beautiful is the universe when something digestible meets with an eager digestion how sweet the embrace when atom rushes to the arms of waiting atom"

"breakfast breakfast i am full of breakfast and they are at breakfast in heaven they breakfast in heaven all s well with the world"

"amen said a beetle who had preceded him into the interior that is the way i feel myself is it not wonderful when one arrives at the place where he can give up his ambitions and resignedly nay even with gladness recognize that it is a far far better thing to be merged harmoniously in the cosmic all and this confortable situation in his midst so affected the marauding robin that he perched upon a blooming twig and sang until the blossoms shook with ecstacy he sang i have a good digestion and there is a god after all which i was wicked enough to doubt yesterday when it rained"

"demons and fishhooks he exclaimed i am losing my personal identity as a worm my individuality is melting away from me odds craw i am becoming part and parcel of this bloody robin so help me i am thinking like a robin and not like a worm any longer yes yes i even find myself agreeing that a robin must live i still do not understand with my mentality why a robin must live and yet i swoon into a condition of belief"

"a robin said to an angleworm as he ate him i am sorry but a bird has to live somehow the worm being slow witted could not gather his dissent into a wise crack and retort he was effectually swallowed before he could turn a phrase"

"i asked him why is it that you are so greatly favored ask rather said warty bliggens what the universe has done to deserve me"

"a little more conversation revealed that warty bliggens considers himself to be the center of the said universe the earth exists to grow toadstools for him to sit under the sun to give him light by day and the moon and wheeling constellations to make beautiful the night for the sake of warty bliggens"

"i met a toad the other day by the name of warty bliggens he was sitting under a toadstool feeling contented he explained that when the cosmos was created that toadstool was especially planned for his personal shelter from sun and rain thought out and prepared for him"

"there is always a comforting thought in time of trouble when it is not our trouble"

"there is bound to be a certain amount of trouble running any country if you are president the trouble happens to you but if you are a tyrant you can arrange things so that most of the trouble happens to other people"

"it is a cheering thought to think that god is on the side of the best digestion"

"dear boss i relay this information without any fear that humanity will take warning and reform"

"it wont be long now it won't be long till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone"

"each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches"

"men talk of money and industry of hard times and recoveries of finance and economics but the ants wait and the scorpions wait for while men talk they are making deserts all the time getting the world ready for the conquering ant drought and erosion and desert because men cannot learn"

"what man calls civilization always results in deserts"

"it wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it man has oppressed us for a million years but he goes on steadily cutting the ground from under his own feet making deserts deserts deserts"

"no insect likes human beings and if you think you can see why the only reason i tolerate you is because you seem less human to me than most of them"

"as i was crawling through the holes in a swiss cheese the other day it occurred to me to wonder what a swiss cheese would think if a swiss cheese could think and after cogitating for some time i said to myself if a swiss cheese could think it would think that a swiss cheese was the most important thing in the world just as everything that can think at all does think about itself"

"i have often noticed that ancestors never boast the descendants who boast of ancestors i would rather start a family than one blood will tell but often it tells too much"

"dance mehitabel dance caper and shake a leg what little blood is left will fizz like wine in a keg"

"well boss mehitabel the cat has reappeared in her old haunts with a flock of kittens archy she said to me yesterday the life of a female artist is continually hampered what in hell have i done to deserve all these kittens i look back on my life and it seems to me to be just one damned kitten after another i am a dancer archy and my only prayer is to be allowed to give my best to my art but just as i feel that i am succeeding in my life work along comes another batch of these damned kittens it is not archy that i am shy on mother love god knows i care for the sweet little things curse them but am i never to be allowed to live my own life i have purposely avoided matrimony in the interests of the higher life but i might just as well have been a domestic slave for all the freedom i have gained i hope none of them gets run over by an automobile my heart would bleed if anything happened to them and i found it out but it isn t fair archy it isn t fair these damned tom cats have all the fun and freedom if i was like some of these green eyed feline vamps i know i would simply walk out on the bunch of them and let them shift for themselves but i am not that kind archy i am full of mother love my kindness has always been my curse a tender heart is the cross i bear self sacrifice always and forever is my motto damn them i will make a home for the sweet innocent little things unless of course providence in his wisdom should remove them they are living just now in an abandoned garbage can just behind a made over stable in greenwich village and if it rained into the can before i could get back and rescue them i am afraid the little dears might drown it makes me shudder just to think of it of course if i were a family cat they would probably be drowned anyhow sometimes i think the kinder thing would be for me to carry the sweet little things over to the river and drop them in myself but a mother s love archy is so unreasonable something always prevents me these terrible conflicts are always presenting themselves to the artist the eternal struggle between art and life archy is something fierce yes something fierce my what a dramatic life i have lived one moment up the next moment down again but always gay archy always gay and always the lady too in spite of hell well boss it will be interesting to note just how mehitabel works out her present problem a dark mystery still broods over the manner in which the former family of three kittens disappeared one day she was talking to me of the kittens and the next day when i asked her about them she said innocently what kittens interrogation point and that was all i could ever get out of her on the subject we had a heavy rain right after she spoke to me but probably that garbage can leaks so the kittens have not yet been drowned"

"an optimist is a guy that has never had much experience"

"procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday"

"oh i should worry and fret death and i will coquette there s a dance in the old dame yet toujours gai toujours gai"

"the octopus's secret wish is not to be a formal fish he dreams that some time he may grow another set of legs or so and be a broadway music show"

"dedicated to babs with babs knows what and babs knows why"

"The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being of the race. The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots."

"The wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy to be lost. It was with no thought of beauty that the builders labored; no conscious thought; they were masters or slaves in the bitter wars of commerce, and they never saw as a whole what they were making; no one of them did. But each one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and the broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret desires of each one labored with him as he labored; the things that were lost and beaten and trampled down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul: the aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the vision defeated were the things that lived, and not the apparent purpose for which each one of all the millions sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the silent things, the winged things, so weak they are easily killed, the unacknowledged things, the rejected beauty, the strangled appreciation, the inchoate art, the submerged spirit — these groped and found each other and gathered themselves together and worked themselves into the tiles and mortar of the edifice and made a town that is a worthy fellow of the sunrise and the sea winds. Humanity triumphs over its details."

"Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE."

"The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it. Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way. BUT . . . overstrain yourself now and then. For this reason: The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new self — if you get what we mean."

"We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not want the kind we want . . . some of you may prefer prunes and morality to the bitter end."

"We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know any of them, far less become intimate with them."

"Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken, outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five calibre revolver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings (to which we have been invited because of our wisdom) in a vein of jocund malice. We shall … but we don’t wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us … We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age."

"Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two."