Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emoti...
Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
What is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes...
After the torchlight red on sweaty facesAfter the frosty silence in the gardensAfter the agony in stony placesThe shouting and the cryingPrison and palace and reverberationOf thunder of spring over di...
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present toget...
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
Genuine blasphemy genuine in spirit and not purely verbal is the product of partial belief and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
What we call the beginning is often an end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
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 quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wa...
All cases are unique and very similar to others.
This love is silent.
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 express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.