William Wallace Best Quotes

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.

God, you’re beautiful,” he growled while his cock throbbed with need. “Ye keep telling me that and ye’ll have me believing it,” she said with the sexiest, most breathless voice he’d ever heard. His fingers sank into her supple flesh. Her breasts were so full, so pliable, he craved to have his mouth on them, craved to suckle her nipples and listen to every soft moan. “You’d best believe me, because whenever you’re near, I feel like a caveman.” “A wild beast?” He nearly roared. “The wildest imaginable.

Paul McCartney’s solo career, Willie Mays’ last season with the New York Mets, Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial, John Ashbery’s Flowchart, Georgia O’Keeffe’s last 10 years of paintings, T.S. Eliot’s plays, & John Glenn’s last flight as an astronaut. The Beatles’ Long and Winding Road, Jim Brown’s last season, Keats’ Odes, Mozart’s concertos, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Wilfred Owen’s lyrics, & Marie Curie in her laboratory. The former set we recall- if at all- because all of the folk were past their prime- way past. Almost embarrassing were their quests &/or achievements. The latter we recall- & will most likely always do so with fondness & fervor- because they left their respective quests at the height of their powers. It’s how we all hope to be recalled. When we think of an afterlife we always envision ourselves at the prime of our life. Who would want to inhabit a realm filled with yipping old yentas & crusty altacockers? It’s one of the oldest stereotypes there is about the creationary impulse: The fires of youth. One of the great sources of woe for a lot of artists is that just as they get enough time & experience under their belts to gain technical skill in their field, the impulse to do so wanes. There seems to be a brief nexus where the 2- skill & desire- meet & are sustaining. Too young & a lot of crap- with potential- is produced. Too old & little work is made- & what is is skilled but dull, repetitive, & uninteresting. Thus most artists, &/or scientists, have similar careers which graphed would form a nice slowly rising & falling horizontal arc whose rounded apex is between the years 35 & 50. But is it necessarily so? There are examples of such who defy the conventional wisdom in poetry. The 2 best examples in the English language are Wallace Stevens & William Butler Yeats- in fact their poetry probably kept improving with age. But for every Stevens & Yeats there’s the last 20 years of Whitman’s bloated poetry & terrible prose, Hardy’s verse, Pound’s Cantos, Ginsberg’s last 30 years, Ashbery, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, Quincy Troupe, & on & on.

A final point on this poem, & RH as a poet. 1 of the great conflation made in criticism of poetry is the terms great & important. They are 2 different things. There are great poets who are not particularly important. In this camp would be an Edgar Allan Poe, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, & Countee Cullen, among some others. These are poets for whom there is no doubt that great poetry sprang from. BUT, their work did not have a profound effect on the advancement of the art form of poetry. They were either technically superb craftsmen who were the best at their craft but wrote on things, & in ways, similar to others. They were simply better. Here would be Poe, Kipling, & Cullen. Or they were inventive & unique, but while inspiring devotees, never gave rise to poetic heirs. Here is Dickinson. Or they were hit & miss poets who often set back the art. Here are Neruda- whose great personal, lyric, & love poems in a traditional vein were counterbalanced by his atrociously puerile political & ‘experimental’ poems. Also in this category- despite his High Modernist credentials, is Ezra Pound. Most of his great poems are in ancient forms, in mock fashion. An envelope-pusher he was not- although he spurred TSE to greater heights than he was capable of by himself. Then there is a Jeffers- a poet who was superb; yet mystifyingly left little impact- most likely due to his reclusive personae & political prophesying. Yet all these poets touched the ineffable at least a few times in their careers. A 2nd camp are those poets who are important but not really great poets. Their poems had significant impact on the art, but the poets’ work, overall, rarely touched greatness. In this camp would reside a T.S. Eliot- whose whole career consists of 5 or 6 near-great to great poems & a passel of shit, William Carlos Williams- whose prosaic approach to poetry overshadowed the fact that he only had 10 or 12 good 10 line or less poems in his arsenal, Arthur Rimbaud- whose impact was more on the ‘cult of the poet’ than on the art form, Anna Akhmatova- whose import was more as ‘functional state treasure’ than persuasive writer, Allen Ginsberg- who has 12 or so great poems that showed new boundaries & subject matter could work in poetry, but also wrote a passel of utter doggerel, & Derek Walcott- who, despite early promise, has a body of banal poetry, yet opened the way for several generations of non-European poets’ poetry to find a Western audience. None of these poets will stand too tall in the coming centuries for their work, but- their impact on varied aspects of the art is undeniable. This is the difference between the 2. Greatness is about how much the art succeeds & stands alone, Import is on the non-artistic aspects of the work & poet. Of course, a 3rd category exists for those poets that were great & important. Whose excellence & import is undeniable. In this camp would reside John Donne- the 1st English language poet with a Modern mindset, if not vocabulary, Walt Whitman- whose work revolutionized subject matter, & led to the war against formalism, Charles Baudelaire- who did the same as Whitman in French, Stephane Mallarmé- whose fragmenting of form led directly to Eliot, but whose work has held up far better despite being older, Hart Crane- who created lyric epopee, & whose verse reached in new directions in new ways- cracking the ekstasis of poetry open & truly inventing the REAL Language poetry of the 20th Century, Marina Tsvetaeva & Sylvia Plath- the 2 women who became iconic Feminist heroines with legions of acolytes worldwide, yet wove together brilliant poetry despite mental illnesses, & Wallace Stevens- whose great poetry has given heart to legions of poetry lovers who appreciate games played with beauty & philosophy.