James Schuyler Quotes

#1. 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

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

James Schuyler

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

James Schuyler

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

James Schuyler

#5. One tends to write beyond what's needed.

James Schuyler

#6. 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.

James Schuyler

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

James Schuyler

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

James Schuyler

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

James Schuyler

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

James Schuyler

#14. 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

#15. What are the questions you wish to ask?

James Schuyler