Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.

The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share.

A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

Now I am almost entirely love.

My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.

many paths in the forest have chosen me. I go on any.

Languagenot urged and crammed with loveis nothing, while that which is is everything.

For your love given ask no return, none. To love you must love to love.

Beauty was worthIts every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending,As darkness covered the garden that is the earth.

I like that name, that game too, though utterly valueless, the animal in usjust sufficiently domesticated, our venomous American aggressiveness confined to balls and bats.