Best 37 quotes of Charles Olson on MyQuotes

An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.

And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

bees dig the plum blossoms

by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill and us, are busy.

Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt.

Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties.

I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.

I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.

I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death is the only trespass

Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law

of rhythm is image / of image is knowing / of knowing there is / a construct

O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl- a bit like Crab Nebula- do for now.

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

The Canadian voice is still too rustic.

The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations.

The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything.

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.

There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe.

This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.

Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from.

what pudor pejorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below

When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?

You can do anything, really. And that, l think, is one of the exciting possibilities of the present, l swear, is the possibility that the goddamn thing can be modaled throughout.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage -- but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £150) overlooking 'the town' sitting there like the Memphite lord of all Creation with my back -- with Dogtown over the Crown of gravelly hill It is not bad to be pissed off

If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.