“What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.”
"Opposites" (1973)
Źródło: Opposites, More Opposites, and a Few Differences
Richard Wilbur:
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Cytaty
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Polubień
Richard Wilbur: Cytaty po angielsku
“Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours”
"The Beautiful Changes"
Kontekst: Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
As quoted by John Gery in Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (1996)
Kontekst: In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Kontekst: When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.
The Pardon
Kontekst: My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.
A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness
"Walking to Sleep" (1969)
Kontekst: Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
Will serve you best — unless you overdo it,
Watching your step too narrowly, refusing
To specify a world, shrinking your purview
To a tight vision of your inching shoes,
Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing
An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Kontekst: It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
“Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product.”
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Kontekst: Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product. Because he must shield his poetry in its creation, the poet, more than other writers, will write without recognition. And because his product is not in great demand, he is likely to look on honors and distinctions with the feigned indifference of the wallflower. Yet of course he is pleased when recognition comes; for what better proof is there that for some people poetry is still a useful and necessary thing — like a shoe.
The Pardon
Kontekst: I started in to cry and call his name,
Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
... I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Kontekst: It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
“The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day”
Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
Kontekst: The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"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."
“They are slow, proud,
And move with a stilted stride
To the land of sheer horizon…”
A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness
Kontekst: The tall camels of the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the
arid
Sun. They are slow, proud,
And move with a stilted stride
To the land of sheer horizon...
“It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings”
"Grace" in The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963)
Kontekst: Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws
For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
"I merely leap and pause."
“Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.”
Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
Źródło: Collected Poems, 1943-2004
Kontekst: The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
"Walking to Sleep" (1969)
A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness
“The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body”
Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
