Richard Wilbur Quotes

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

I would feel dead if I didn’t have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray.

Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.

The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

What’s lightly hid is deepest understood.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product’s something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light

Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

That’s the main business of the poem!-to see if you can’t make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.