78 John Berryman Quotes on Poetry, The Dream Songs and Poets - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous John Berryman quotes. There are more than 78 quotes in our John Berryman quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning John Berryman wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Poetry, The Dream Songs and Poets

Heartmating hesitating unafraid.

So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

Offering Dragons quarter is no good, they regrow all their parts and come on again. They have to be killed.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

I can offer you only: this world like a knife.

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn.

I cry. Evil dissolves, and love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan’s under a frenzy of who love me and who shine.

We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.

I didn’t want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.

Praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

Literature bores me, especially great literature.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that’s always easiest.

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

leave wizard Henry: at his lectern wherehe's working on his phantasies: Disperse!and everything goes worseso the world fills with her knees, harmful & fair:a medium where 'Fuck you' comes as no cursebut come as a sigh or a prayer.

The Dream Songs Quotes

All souls converge upon a hopeless motetonight, as thoughthe throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise upto say they cannot care, to say they abidewhatever is to come.My air is flung with souls which will not stopand among them hangs a soul that has not diedand refuses to come home.

The Dream Songs Quotes

General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,Captain Fatigue, and at the base of allpale Corporal Fatigue,and curious microbes came, came viruses:and the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henrythe rare Order of Weak.

Fatigue Quotes Illness Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

Love her he doesn't but the thought he putsinto that young womanwould launch a national productcomplete with TV spots & skywritingoutlets in Bonn & TokyoI mean it

Infatuation Quotes

When by me in the dusk my child sits down I am myself. Simon, if it’s that loose,let me wiggle it out.You’ll get a bigger one there, & bite.How they loft, how their sizes delight and grate. The proportioned, spiritless poems accumulate. And they publish themaway in brutish London, for a hollow crown.

He had tried everything, cutting down (many devices), pipes, cigars, even cold turkey. He had quit once in Rome, for seven hours after breakfast, during the last two of which his (first) wife was begging him to take it up again.

Recovery Quotes

Henry’s UnderstandingHe was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine,aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,my good wife long in bed.All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,putting the marker in the book, & sleep,& wake to a hot breakfast.Off the coast was an island, P’tit Manaan,the bluff from Richard’s lawn was almost sheer.A chill at four o’clock.It only takes a few minutes to make a man.A concentration upon now & here.Suddenly, unlike Bach,& horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to methat one night, instead of warm pajamas,I’d take off all my clothes& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluffinto the terrible water & walk foreverunder it out toward the island.

Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridgewould not have been scared, like you & me,he would have been, before the bullet that was his,studying the movements of the birds,said disappointed & amazed Henry.

The Dream Songs Quotes Yeats Quotes

The only happy people in the worldare those who do not have to write long poems

Poetry Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

During those years he met his seminars,went & lectured & read, talked with human beings,paid insurance & taxes;but his mind was not on it. his mind was elsewheresin an area where the soul not talks but sings& where foes are attacked with axes.

Academia Quotes Fantasy Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

Hunger was constitutional with him,women, cigarettes, liquor, need need needuntil he went to pieces.The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not heedtheir piecedom but kept very quietly onamong the chaos.

The Dream Songs Quotes Writing Quotes

That baby has got to learn thingsincluding remaining erect & on deck & all,her study of herself must include no wings.She's sturdy, beautiful, & she will do, unlessthe universal homage turns her headas it might well do mine,hypnotized by the Little Baby...

Babies Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

No, I didn't. But I was aware that I was embarked on an epic. In the case of the Bradstreet poem, I didn't know. The situation with that poem was this. I invented the stanza in '48 and wrote the first stanza and the first three lines of the second stanza, and then I stuck. I had in mind a poem roughly the same length as another of mine, “The Statue”—about seven or eight stanzas of eight lines each. Then I stuck. I read and read and read and thought and collected notes and sketched for five years until, although I was still in the second stanza, I had a mountain of notes and draftings—no whole stanzas, but passages as long as five lines. The whole poem was written in about two months, after which I was a ruin for two years. When I finally got going, I had this incredible mass of stuff and a very good idea of the shape of the poem, with the exception of one crucial point, which was this. I'll tell you in a minute why and how I got going. The great exception was this: It did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them—to insert bodily Henry into the poem . . . Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem . . .

My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.

77 Dream Songs Quotes Psychiatrist Quotes

I am the little man who smokes & smokes.I am the girl who does know better but.I am the king of the pool.I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.

77 Dream Songs Quotes Smokes Quotes

The Traveller"They pointed me out on the highway, and they said'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That manWill never become as we are, try as he can.'They pointed me out at the station, and the guardLooked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.I took the same train that the others took,To the same place. Were it not for that lookAnd those words, we were all of us the same.I studied merely maps. I tried to nameThe effects of motion on the travellers,I watched the couple I could see, the curseAnd blessings of that couple, their destination,The deception practised on them at the station,Their courage. When the train stopped and they knewThe end of their journey, I descended too.

I ask for a decreedooming my bitter enemies to laughteradvanced against them.

Laughter Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

Dream Song 55"Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.The architecture is far from reassuring.I feel uneasy.A pity,—the interview began so well:I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them awayand sloshed out a martinistrangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters—God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,John's energy,anti-matter matter. I felt fine.Then a change came backward. A chill fell.Talk slackened,died, and began to give me sideways looks.'Chirst,' I thought 'what now?' and would have askt for anotherbut didn't dare.I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:'We betrayed me.

The Curse"Cedars and the westward sun.The darkening sky. A man aloneWatches beside the fallen wallThe evening multitudes of sinCrowd in upon us all.For when the light fails they beginNocturnal sabotage amongThe outcast and the loose of tongue,The lax in walk, the murderers:Our twilight universal curse.Children are faultless in the wood,Untouched. If they are later madeScandal and index to their time,It is that twilight brings for breadThe faculty of crime.Only the idiot and the deadStand by, while who were young beforeWage insolent and guilty warBy night within that ancient house,Immense, black, damned, anonymous.

Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,inimitable contriver,endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,thank you for such as it is my gift.I have made up a morning prayer to youcontaining with precision everything that most matters.‘According to Thy will’ the thing begins.It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.You have come to my rescue again & againin my impassable, sometimes despairing years.You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselvesand I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs:how can I ‘love’ you?I only as far as gratitude & aweconfidently & absolutely go.I have no idea whether we live again.It doesn’t seem likelyfrom either the scientific or the philosophical point of viewbut certainly all things are possible to you,and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter andto Paulas I believe I sit in this blue chair.Only that may have been a special caseto establish their initiatory faith.Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.May I stand until death forever at attentionfor any your least instruction or enlightenment.I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty.

The serious poet should seek to explore the 'sources' of these global nightmares-and to explore them not just in poetry, but in person. Poetry is a terminal activity, taking place out near the end of things.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,What, what is he to do? I saw it goMerrily bouncing, down the street, and thenMerrily over-there it is in the water!

A mind so dark it made one wonder if the Renaissance had ever really taken place.

The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.

Dream Song 187Them lady poets must not marry, pal.Miss Dickinson—fancy in Amherst bedding hér.Fancy a lark with Sappho,a tumble in the bushes with Miss Moore,a spoon with Emily, while Charlotte glare.Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.That was the lot. And two of them are hereas yet, and—and: Sylvia Plath is not.She—she her credentialshas handed in, leaving alone two totsand widower to what he makes of it—surviving guy, &when Tolstoy’s pathetic widow doing her whung(after them decades of marriage) & kids, she decided he was queer& loving his agent.Wherefore he rush off, leaving two journals, & die.It is a true error to marry with poetsor to be by them.

Huffy Henry hid the day, unappeasable Henry sulked. I see his point,--a trying to put things over. It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked & away. But he should have come out and talked. All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry's side. Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don't see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear & be. Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top, and I sang. Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.

John Berryman: The Song of the Tortured Girl After a little I could not have told - But no one asked me this – why I was there. I asked. The ceiling of that place was high And there were sudden noises, which I made. I must have stayed there a long time today: My cup of soup was gone when they brought me back. Often ‘Nothing worse now can come to us’ I thought, the winter the young men stayed away, My uncle died, and mother broke her crutch. And then the strange room where the brightest light Does not shine on the strange men: shines on me. I feel them stretch my youth and throw a switch. Through leafless branches the sweet wind blows Making a mild sound, softer than a moan; High in a pass once where we put our tent, Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy. - I no longer remember what they want. - Minutes I lie awake to hear my joy.

Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup, you is bad powers.

Poetry Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the world has never heard before. Like Yeats's great outburst at the end of his life. This comes out of a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent, Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. The incredible difference between the achievement of A and the achievement of B is that B wanted it, so he made all kinds of sacrifices. A could have had it, but he didn’t give a damn.[...]But what I was going on to say is that I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, "Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm," but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I'm out, but short of that, I don't know. I hope to be nearly crucified,

Is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls.

Poems Quotes The Dream Songs Quotes

1
2