Poets From The United States

"The atmosphere of poetry today seems strained and unnatural. There is an attempt to force the growth of poetry."

"O happy life! life hid with Christ in God! So making me, At home, and by the wayside, and abroad, Alone with Thee!"

"We must be wise task-masters, and not require of ourselves what we can not possibly perform. Recreation we must have. Otherwise, the strings of our soul, wound up to an unnatural tension, will break."

"It shouldn't be a Republican or Democratic issue whether we take care of the environment. That should be a human issue."

"A lot of times we look at the whole world and think, 'it's so daunting, how can we change the whole world?' and you don't need to do that, what you need to do is change your world a little bit, and see if you can, through example, inspire others to do the same thing."

"I'm glad Bush is coming out so strongly against gay marriage, because I think it's time in this country for people to wake up... If your partner happens to be the same sex as you, I don't have a problem with that and I don't think anyone else should. We're not doing a service to our kids by cloistering them from reality. It's better to discuss reality."

"My goal has not ever been to change minds, my goal is to open minds."

"The human interest, and the natural interest, and the spiritual interest of this planet need to begin to take a priority over the corporate interest, the military interest, and the materialistic interests."

"I've never really been into flags of any kind, cause flags can bring people together, but they always bring people together against other people, and I don't really consider myself to be a patriot in the sense that I say, 'okay, this is my nation,' I consider myself to be a child of this whole planet."

"People ask me a lot, 'what can one person do,' and I say 'I'm not really sure what one person can due except come together with other people.'"

"I think after 9/11, when we were in our moment of greatest sadness as a nation... this small group of neo-conservatives used our pain in order to set their agenda on their course."

"We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace."

"Don't fear the nighttime, cause the monsters know that you're divine. Don't fear the sunshine, cause everything's better in the summertime"

"Life is too short to make just one decision, music is too loud for just one station, love is too big for just one nation, and God is too big for just one religion!"

"Sometimes, I feel like I can do anything, and, sometimes, I'm so alive, sometimes, I feel like I could zoom across the sky and, sometimes, I wanna cry."

"Those who start wars never fight them, and those who fight wars never like them."

"The harder they hit us, the louder we become, kind of like the skin on a drum."

"Every bit of land is a holy land, and every drop of water is a holy water, and every single child is a son or a daughter of the one earth mama, and the one earth papa."

"You say you're a Christian, cause God made you, you say you're a Muslim cause God made you, you say you're a Hindu and the next man a Jew, but then we all kill each other cause God told us to? Naw!"

"You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money.... You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar."

"Days, up and down they come Like rain on a conga drum Forget most, remember some But don't turn none away Everything is not enough And nothin' is too much to bear Where you been is good and gone All you keep is the getting there To live is to fly Low and high So shake the dust off of your wings And the sleep out of your eyes"

"If I needed you, would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain? If you needed me, I would come to you I'd swim the seas for to ease your pain Well, in the night forlorn, oh, the morning's born And the morning shines with the lights of love And you will miss sunrise if you close your eyes And that would break my heart in two The lady's with me now since I showed her how To lay her lily hand in mine Loop and Lil agree, she's a sight to see A treasure for the poor to find"

"The name she gave was Caroline Daughter of a miner Her ways were free It seemed to me That sunshine walked beside her"

"At one time, friends, I had a ma, I even had a pa Well he beat her with a belt once 'cause she cried She told him to take care of me, headed down to Tennessee Well, it's easier than just a-waitin' around to die I came of age and I found a girl in a Tuscaloosa bar Ah, she cleaned me out and hit it on the sly Well, I tried to kill the pain, I bought some wine and hopped a train It seemed easier than just a-waitin' around to die"

"The promise in her smile shames the mountains tall She can bring the sun to shining. She can tell the rain to fall. It's been a long time, Mama, since I heard you call my name, Ah, been a long time since I heard you call my name I got to see my Colorado girl again Be there tomorrow, Mama, don't you cry"

"Pancho was a bandit boys His horse was fast as polished steel Wore his gun outside his pants For all the honest world to feel Pancho met his match you know On the deserts down in Mexico Nobody heard his dying words That's the way it goes All the Federales say They could have had him any day They only let him hang around Out of kindness I suppose"

"I have made the complete return [from imagination] to nature, and nature is, as we all know, primarily an intellectual idea. I am satisfied that painting also is like nature, an intellectual idea, and that the laws of nature as presented to the mind through the eye and the eye is the painter's first and last vehicle are the means of transport to the real mode of thought: the only legitimate source of aesthetic experience for the intelligent painter."

"I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released myself and this axiom was: "Put off intellect and put on imagination; the imagination is the man." From this doctrinal assertion evolved the theoretical axiom that you don't see a thing until you look away from it which was an excellent truism as long as the principles of the imaginative life were believed in and followed. I no longer believe in the imagination."

"What I have to express is not handled with words. It must 'come' tot the observer. It must carry its influence over the mind of the individual into that region of him which is more than the mind. The pictures must reach inwards into the deeper experiences of the beholder – and mind you they care in no sense religious tracts – there is no story to them or literature – no morals – they are merely artistic expressions of mystical states – these in themselves being my own personal motives as drawn from either special experiences or aggregate ones."

"The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.. ..the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal – a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth – a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere."

"Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (Aix-en-Provence where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where w:El Greco lived and painted for many years]. Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist."

"I could never be French, I could never become German – I shall always remain American – the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes."

"I believe until a man has given up himself he has given up nothing - all his knowledge of accepted aesthetics are of no avail until he has stepped aside from them and given up himself – himself only through the eyes of himself. What a problem everlasting then is it not? A life time of breathless endeavor to be the thing and do the thing of his being – So easy to travel along with claques and crowds, voicing vociferously the great discoveries of each – How ineffably difficult, voicing the soul of one man – alone to himself and – then to whomever else hears.."

"..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature.."

"My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape."

"..by getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get.. .. we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things."

"One explanation for the neglect of women's part in shaping The Masses and its content may lie in an image of the magazine constructed by its chroniclers. Indeed, the extent to which historians have neglected discussion of Masses women is quite remarkable. Daniel Aaron, in his Writers on the Left (1961), devotes some twenty pages to The Masses. He deals with Eastman, Dell, and Reed at considerable length, while mentioning the founding members Inez Haynes Irwin and Mary Heaton Vorse in a single line...More recent histories redress the balance somewhat-notably Judith Schwartz's study of women of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy club, many of whose members had ties with The Masses, and Art for The Masses, Rebecca Zurier's 1987 anthology of the work of Masses artists. Nancy Cott's frequent allusions to Masses women in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) indicate how very central to that grounding to the shaping of turn-of-the-century feminist discourse Masses women were. But in many imaginations, The Masses remains the project of Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed (journalist), Art Young, and Charles Winter."

"Two editors of the Masses, Crystal Eastman's brother Max and Floyd Dell, used that journal for vigorous advocacy of feminist issues... The Masses was the only male-edited socialist journal that consistently affirmed the importance of equality as essential for the full development of the lives of both men and women. In a satiric piece, Floyd Dell took up the arguments of the antifeminists. "I thought, you see, that [women] were persons like myself. Well, they aren't. I know better now.""

"My work embodies little visions of the great intangible.. ..Some will say he’s gone mad – others will look and say he’s looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him."

"Byron’s whole contribution to literature is the inculcation of an amused and amusing cynicism in regard to Human Nature. But it is a broken-hearted cynicism. He mocks because he once believed. His cynicism is the souring of a youthful love of mankind. Byron’s youth had been nourished upon eighteenth-century Utopianism. He, too, once believed in man; and his cynic humor is the in which he disguises his indignation and chagrin at the betrayal of his hopes."

"[I was] happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. .. rendering the God-spirit in the mountains."

"They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience."

"In a word, the home is a little dull. When you have got a woman in a box, and you pay rent on the box, her relationship to you insensibly changes character. It loses the fine excitement of democracy. It ceases to be companionship, for companionship is only possible in a democracy. It is no longer a sharing of life together—it is a breaking of life apart. Half a life—cooking, clothes, and children; half a life—business, politics, and baseball. It doesn’t make much difference which is the poorer half. Either half, when it comes to life, is very near to none at all.Of course, this artificial distinction does not strictly obtain in any particular marriage. There is an attempt to break it down. It is an honourable attempt. But our civilization is nevertheless built on that distinction, In order to break down that distinction utterly, it will be necessary to break down all the codes and restrictions and prejudices that keep women out of the great world. It is in the great world that a man finds his sweetheart, and in that narrow little box outside of the world that he loses her. When she has left that box and gone back into the great world, a citizen and a worker, then with surprise and delight he will discover her again, and never let her go."

"As soon as a real artist finds out what art is, the more is he likely to feel the need of keeping silent about it, and about himself in connection with it. There is almost, these days, a kind of petit scandale in the thought of allying oneself with anything of a professional nature. And it is at this point that I shrink a little from asserting myself with regard to professional aspects of art. And here the quality of confession must break through."

"..of what use is a painting which does not realize its aesthetical problem? Underlying all sensible works of art, there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problems understood. It was so with those artists of the great past who had the intellectual knowledge of structure upon which to place their emotions. It is this structural beauty that makes the old [clssical] painting valuable. And so it becomes to me a problem. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression.. .The real artists have always been interested in this problem, and you feel it strongly in the work of [Leonardo] Da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Courbet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Cezanne."

"I have joined, once and for all, the ranks of the intellectual experimentalists. I can hardly bear the sound of the words "expressionism," "emotionalism," "personality," and such, because they imply the wish to express personal life, and I prefer to have no personal life. Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual indelicacy."

"They want Americans to be American, and yet they offer little or no spiritual sustenance for their growth and welfare [quote on the critics who push to stop his long European stay and to return]"

"Cubism taught me much and the principle of Pissarro, furthered by Seurat, taught me more. These with Cezanne are the great logicians of color. No one will ever paint like Cezanne for example, because no one will ever have his peculiar visual gifts; or to put it less dogmatically, will anyone ever appear again with so peculiar and almost unbelievable a faculty for dividing color sensations and making logical realizations of them? Has anyone ever placed his color more reasonably with more of a sense of time and measure than he? I think not, and he furnished for the enthusiast of today new reasons for research into the realm of color for itself."

"Hartley knew there were many ways to be brave"

"It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation.. ..My work requires it – but I myself have no need or use for it – Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative – I think all chrysalises do – all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion –resurrection – the establishment of the entity. But now I’ve come up tot the outside of my casements."