Richard Wilbur Quotations

Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray...

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

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.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.