People From St Louis

"Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin"

"The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh and blood."

"so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed."

"The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?"

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree."

"Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob."

"Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!" The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness."

"Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain."

"He laughed like an irresponsible fœtus."

"His laughter tinkled among the teacups."

"Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law."

"The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn."

"I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates."

"Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions."

"Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose."

"Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand."

"Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair."

"And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression."

"I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing."

"One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms."

"The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"It is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts."

"What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

"Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know."

"Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities."

"Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year..."

"What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new."

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism."

"The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity."

"We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

"I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me."

"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous — Almost, at times, the Fool."

"It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a Pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.""

"I am no prophet — and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid."

"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

"Arms that are braceleted and white and bare [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress?"

"The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?"

"I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room."

"For I have known them all already, known them all: — Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

"In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

"Do I dare Disturb the universe?"

"And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”"

"And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions."

"There will be time to murder and create."

"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening."

"In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo."

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table."

"A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like school boys..."