James Schuyler Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I wish i could press snowflakes in a book like flowers.”
-- James Schuyler -
“In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively”
-- James Schuyler -
“It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)”
-- James Schuyler -
“I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem”
-- James Schuyler -
“It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing”
-- James Schuyler -
“The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate”
-- James Schuyler -
“Snow falling softly on lashes of eyes you love, and a cold cheek growing warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.”
-- James Schuyler -
“Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.”
-- James Schuyler -
“A nothing day full of wild beauty .... Little fish stream by, a river in water.”
-- James Schuyler -
“However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.”
-- James Schuyler