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Poetry Quotes by Thomas Stearns Eliot
- Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
- It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.
- Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,
- I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in…
- 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…
- Poetry is a mug's game.
- 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…
- We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for…
- Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.…
- Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
- Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
- This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
- Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to…
- Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
- 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…
- Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
- I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
- For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
- Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.
- It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is…
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- 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
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden