Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.
This is my firm persuasion, that since the human soul exerts itself with so great activity, since it has such a remembrance of the best, such a concern for the future, since it is enriched with so many arts, sciences, and discoveries, it is impossible but the being which contains all these must be immortal.
Electrical force is defined as something which causes motion of electrical charge; an electrical charge is something which exerts electric force.
A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination. " Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 911, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm. . . all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.
Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.
I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.
The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
Critical sobriety is out of the question so long as this master of terror-in-the-commonplace exerts his spell.
When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.
