Opus Posthumous

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.

To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.

A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom

Or poets with holy magic.

Hey-di-ho.

God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).

A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

Man is an eternal sophomore.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

All history is modern history.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

The world is a force, not a presence.