« All Poet Quotes · Thomas Stearns Eliot's Page
Poet Quotes by Thomas Stearns Eliot
- Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
- Good poets borrow, great poets steal
- The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.
- When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are…
- Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to…
- A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
- No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.
- Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.
- The immature poet imitates, the mature poet plagiarizes,
- What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of…
- I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.
- Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions…
- When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
- I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't…
- Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
- The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
- Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to…
- The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
- As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel…
- The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to…
- No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead…
- One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature…
- The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which…
- Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
More Poet Quotes
- Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake… — Hannah Arendt
- It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. — Aristotle
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art… — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only… — Wystan Hugh Auden
- Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy… — Wystan Hugh Auden