Controversial Sayings

The Tale originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular, provided I treated it seriously.

The most remarkable feature in this production is the bad paper on which it is printed, and the typographical ingenuity with which matter barely enough for one volume has been spread over the pages of two...

If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul, you haven't experienced poetry.

To elevate the soul poetry is necessary.

A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking, Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking. Give me now libidinous joys only, Give me the drench of my passions, Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet, Bathing myself…

Sex is the root of it all—the animal want, the eager physical hunger, Sex will not be put aside; it is a great ordination of the universe.

Filthy to others, to me they are not filthy, but illustrious; while critics consider those subjects from the point of view of persons standing on the lowest animal and infidelistic platform. Which, then, is really the beast?

Expurgate, expurgate, expurgate! I've heard that till I'm deaf with it.

If I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out. The bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. The full scheme would no longer exist—it would have been violated in its most sensitive spot.

The great poems, Shakspere [sic] included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us…

The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men.

I am for those who believe in loose delights, The woman that arouses a man, the man that arouses a woman.

I remember I saw only that man who passionately clung to me, Again we wander, we love, we separate again, Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go, I see him close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history.

We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.