James Schuyler famous quotes

07-20-2025

I wish i could press snowflakes in a book like flowers.
-- James Schuyler

#Flower #Book #Wish
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

#Past #Trying #Definitions
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

#Mean #Thinking #Mysterious
One tends to write beyond what's needed
-- James Schuyler

#Writing #Needed
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem
-- James Schuyler

#Cutting #Ends
It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing
-- James Schuyler

#Writing #Interest #Pleasant
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

#Artist #Firsts #Impossible
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

#Fall #Eye #Dark
What are the questions you wish to ask?
-- James Schuyler

#Wish
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

#Stars #Dark #Night
A nothing day full of wild beauty .... Little fish stream by, a river in water.
-- James Schuyler

#Rivers #Water #Littles
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
-- James Schuyler

#Poetry #Prose #Sentences

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