“What end impersonal, what breathless age,
Incontinent of quiet and of years,
What calm catastrophe will yet assuage
This final drouth of penitential tears?”
"John Sutter"
The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1960)
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Yvor Winters 12
American poet and literary critic 1900–1968Related quotes
Section 4, member 2, subsection 4, Symptoms of Despair, Fear, Sorrow, Suspicion, Anxiety, Horror of Conscience, Fearful Dreams and Visions.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III
“Quiet authority accomplishes what violence cannot, and that mandate compels more which comes from a commanding calm.”
Peragit tranquilla potestas<br/>quod violenta nequit; mandataque fortius urget<br/>imperiosa quies.
Peragit tranquilla potestas
quod violenta nequit; mandataque fortius urget
imperiosa quies.
Panegyricus dictus Manlio Theodoro consuli, lines 239-241 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Claudian/Manlio_Theodoro*.html#239.
“And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.”
Source: Selected Poetry
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.
The Fountain, st. 8 & 9 (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)
“In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.”
Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 355