## Metadata - Author: [[Wendell Berry]] - Full Title: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford - Category: #books ## Highlights - We are seeing the emergence of stewardly arts and sciences, submitted to the service and good-keeping of home places, as opposed to the triumphal arts and sciences of individual genius and ambition that still are dominant in the universities, where the specialist or professional career, not a place, is the context of work. ([Location 357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=357)) - If you got something outside the common run that’s got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolk; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=508)) - you may reasonably suspect that the poet worked his way to each new poem partly by the motive of disappointment with the last. ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=727)) - To say that poetry distinguishes itself from prose by being written in lines is not at all to suggest that poetry need not concern itself with sentences, or that sentences are less important than lines. It seems to me that in the poems I like best the two structural members, line and sentence, are of equal importance. The line, I think, has the character of music, and the sentence or syntax the character of sense. The expressive means of poetry thus consists not only of the play of line against line and of sentence against sentence, but of the interplay of line and sentence. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=759)) - Or we can say, as we would say of a field or a farm, that a poem has a certain carrying capacity. If that capacity is exceeded, the poem stumbles or breaks down. If, on the other hand, the poem is not overburdened, and if it is otherwise well-handled, it will have a margin of ease in which it can move fluently—and maybe this gives us a practical, an auditory, sense of “in measure.” What has been included is brought within measure, made eloquent, even musical, by being freed of the burden of all that has been, has needed to be, excluded. ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=983)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - The Islamic scholar, Martin Lings, in writing about “the ritual dances of Sufism,” said that “rhythm is a miraculous bridge between movement and repose, and amongst other things it is able to confer upon ‘the dry bones of words’ the power and privileges of music.”4 ([Location 1061](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1061)) - The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quality of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind. ([Location 1522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1522)) - Imagination and its works give us the possibility of completeness short of totality or infinity. If we are complete, then we don’t have to be limitlessly greedy—and forever disappointed. We don’t have to consume the whole creation or burst. ([Location 1526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1526)) - Tags: [[poetry]] [[favorite]] - He rejects as copying or plagiarism Hamlet’s proposition that art is a mirror held up to nature, and proposes instead that art is an imitation of the processes or creativity of nature. ([Location 1552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1552)) - The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge.   It is the imagination on which reality rides . . .   It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science . . .   Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality—Poetry   The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge in a living current ([Location 1604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1604)) - with all issues related to the making and meaning of art, we are humbled and eventually silenced by the difficulty mentioned earlier: that of discussing in sequence processes that occur simultaneously and even instantaneously. ([Location 1646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1646)) - Our nation, from the standpoint of our country, was badly retarded in Williams’ time, as he carefully knew, and it is worse retarded now. The most important reason for this is its failure to develop a culture, or rather cultures, rooted in locality. Because of racism, manifest destiny, geographic ignorance or wishfulness, equation of wealth with virtue and power with intelligence, and faith in universal technological “solutions,” we have been blind to local differences or careless of them, or have held them in contempt. Our great centers of wealth and power—and, yes, of culture—live by the destruction of landscapes and communities that they consider “provincial,” of which they know nothing, and for which they have taken no responsibility. Individual persons cannot justly be blamed for expatriating themselves or migrating to a great city. But a culture and an economy, which are nearly synonymous, are certainly blameable for ignoring and destroying their sources. ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1779)) - a place distracted by the technologies of communication and entertainment, its past mostly forgotten, its present obscured, its future for sale. ([Location 1795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004R9PZSC&location=1795))