William Carlos Williams

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.