James Schuyler Quotations

To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

A nothing day full of wild beauty .... Little fish stream by, a river in water.

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.

What are the questions you wish to ask?

It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem

One tends to write beyond what's needed

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)

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

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

Snow falling softly on lashes of eyes you love, and a cold cheek growing warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.

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