E. B. White Quotes

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

A good painting is a lot like a good joke: you need to know when to stop, too many 'punchlines and you will have gone too far.

When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

I used to think there was something cheap in trying to make beautiful sentences. Now I think language has its own ways and ends, and it does one's thinking good to try to serve them. Beauty isn't truth. But a certain kind of clear beauty will help in the pursuit of truth.

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

Too many poets write poems which are only difficult on the surface, difficult because the dramatic situation is easily misunderstood. It's not difficult to write poems that are misunderstood. A drunk, a three-year-old-they are easily misunderstood. What is difficult is being clear and mysterious at the same time. The dramatic situation needs to be as clear in a poem as it is in a piece of good journalism. The why is part of the mystery, but the who, what, where, and when should all be understood.

I say things, but I say them indirectly. At the same time, I try to make my images as direct as possible.

The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.