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  • When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

    William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.54, New Directions Publishing