Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom,… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with… — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image