American poet & novelist (1892-1954)
A waterfall hurdled its crazed parabola between gray rocks, flying into a stifled scream of motion far below.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Introducing Irony
What men call triumph is a fanciful exaltation that may fall alike upon atoms and temples--a grandiose child of hope, whose mother is egoism and whose father is pain. Men, whose life is but a sensitive or oblivious second--a fleeting stampede within mist--seek the absurd consolation of believing that their work will become immortal, and this phantom lie has induced many a soldier to writhe upon some trivial battlefield and many a minor poet to fight with threats of the gutter.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Blackguard
Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Impulsive Dialogue"
Reality is a formless lure,
And only when we know this
Do we dare to be unreal.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Dialogue Between a Past and Present Poet"
Your life is a minor rhapsody for flute and violin.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"The Incurable Mystic Answers Western Ambitions", The Sardonic Arm
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
attributed, Letters from Bohemia
H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken. There is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
attributed, Letters from Bohemia
He had borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he called God.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Introducing Irony
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Advice To a Pool"
To live without love is impossible, and so the loveless man or woman seeks an ersatz passion, like extreme hate or cruelty with which love is inextricably woven as a treacherous swamp is part of a cosmic scheme that includes the pastures of Paradise.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village
The morning glowed over the garden like an incoherent rhapsody. It lacked order and thought, and the serious eyes of teachers and jesters would have spurned it.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Introducing Irony
Because the gliding search of our life
Is lacking in one quality, amusement,
We shall often return
To evenings, men, and walls of stone.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Introducing Irony
The cult of beauty without social responsibility is a threat to civilization as we know it.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village
Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and cannot sincerely be disliked.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Introducing Irony
If we are to believe Schopenhauer, women are incapable of romantic love and merely use man's love hunger as bait to fish babies out of the treacherous sea of matrimony. Of course Schopenhauer, who threw a female servant down a flight of stairs, and was intimate with numerous women he hated philosophically, is no unbiased witness to woman's unfathomable treachery.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village
Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Introducing Irony