17 quotes
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?
Poetry and the Age (1953)
As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.”
Poetry and the Age (1953)
If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself — and, sometimes, doing so — is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast — and as someone said, “If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”
Poetry and the Age (1953)
How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
Poetry and the Age (1953)