#poetry

I have lain awake in the darkness many nights Thinking of poems, going to sleep on poems, Finally,with the darkness closing on The bright remembered words. I have thought of the darkness Closing on the world, the words of the poems forgotten, All the great beautiful words of the poems Fading from the mind of the world, let go Slowly, unknowingly, as from the mind Of one diseased the light of man's endeavor Fades to the idiot darkness and is lost. Part of the darkness, I have lain awake Watching the poems of the world fade out like stars. ↗

— Charles E. Butler

#beauty

Balder the beautiful/is dead, is dead! ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#beauty

Pardon if all the cleanness and the beauty Brave rhythym and the immemorial sea Ensare us sometimes with their siren song, Forgetful of our murderous intentions. Through our uneasy peacetime carnival Cold sweat of death holds us like a dew; Even this grey machinery of murder Holds beauty and the promise of a future. ↗

— Norman Hampson

#beauty

When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious, how benign, is Solitude ↗

— William Wordsworth

#solitude #business

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#business

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos. ↗

— P.K. Page

#language #poetry #words #beauty

THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#beauty

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. ↗

— John Berryman

#artists #beethoven #goya #literature #luck

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new. ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#poetry #love

Used to be he was my heart's desire. His forthright gaze, his expert hands: I'd lie on the couch with my eyes closed just thinking about it. Never about the fact that everything changes, that even this, my best passion, would not be immune. No, I would bask on in an eternal daydream of the hands finding me, the gaze like a winding stair coaxing me down. . . . Until I caught a glimpse of something in the mirror: silly girl in her lingerie, dancing with the furniture-- a hot little bundle, flush with cliches. Into that pair of too-bright eyes I looked and saw myself. And something else: he would never look that way. ↗

— Deborah Garrison

#poetry #women #change