Quotations
Latest update: December 2025
"Words are the only things that last forever"
William Hazlitt, Table talk, 1824.
"I think a poet's job is to pay attention"
Angela France, Ledbury poetry festival, 2021.
"the poet can . . . go deep . . . into the
reality of things . . . [but] the aid of the reason, far from
strengthening, paralyses that impulse of the emotions that
alone can carry them into the world's heart"
Marcel Proust, essay - Against obscurity.
"No sensible author, in the midst of
something that he is trying to write, can stop to consider
whether it is going to be romantic or the opposite. At the
moment when one writes, one is what one is, and the damage of
a lifetime, and of having been born into an unsettled society,
cannot be repaired at the moment of composition."
T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 1933
"when all is said and done it is only the
inexpressible, only what one thought one would not succeed in
putting into a book, which survives. . . . When we have not
experienced this inexpressible something, we flatter ourselves
that our own work is the equal of that of those who have
experienced it, for the words after all are the same. Only it
is not in the words, it is not expressed, it is mixed in
between the words, like the mist on a morning in Chantilly."
Marcel Proust, essay on Gerard de Nerval.
"We read and write poetry because we are
members of the human race. And the human race is filled with
passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are
noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry,
beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for".
Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society.
"The art of the future shall be to feed the
interior life of individuals and will not be dominated by any
theory: political, philosophical or religious".
Cecil Collins, catalogue for exhibition at the Bloomsbury
Gallery, 1935. Quoted in "The Magic Mirror, Thoughts and
reflections on Cecil Collins", John Stewart Allitt, Temenos
Academy, 2010.
"[on the writing of a poem] - If I knew where
it would end, why start . . . What is interesting is the
watersheds in the thought that can happen over a line break".
Philip Gross, reading at the Vaughan Association, 2014
"The only reality is a shared reality,
situated within a common ground".
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation, Vintage, 1998, p.195
"No great artist ever sees things as they
really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist".
Oscar Wilde, Intentions, Methuen, 1891, The Decay of
Lying, an Observation, p.44
"Even though I cannot foresee which path you
will take with your law doctorate, I find the great contrast
between your two occupations positive; the more diverse the
life of the mind, the better the chances are that your
inspiration will be protected, the inspiration which cannot be
predicted, that which is motivated from within".
Reiner Maria Rilke, letter to Elisabeth Ephrussi, quoted in The
Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal,Vintage Books,
2011, p.216
"Every poem is an act of discovery . . . for
me it is an altered state of being, when I can reach the
deeper strands of my inner being ."
Jane Hirschfield, at Ledbury Poetry Festival, June
2012
"...that difference and the sense of not
quite belonging that causes so many to become poets"
William Ayot, at Poetry on the Border, October 2012
"The literary is not dependent on the
philosophical, and the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or
metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of
imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary
soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep
self, our ultimate inwardness."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, Macmillan/Papermac,
1995, Preface & Prelude, p.10
"The best culture is not divorced from life,
but our most profound way to make sense of it."
Harry Eyres The slow lane, Financial Times, December
29/30 2012
"I believe that poetry is about expanding our
consciousness of a world of which we only have occasional
glimpses."
Peter Bennet PBS Bulletin 206 2005, p. 8
"The poem that can't be improved by a
sympathetic reader's suggestion is as rare as a green-spotted
unicorn."
John Lucas, interview with William Oxley, Acumen 70,
2010, p. 15
"Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs
of perception; he perceives more than sense can discover. "
William Blake, There is no natural religion
"Poetry demands, even commands,
concentration; it isolates a man willy-nilly, forcing its
company on him unbidden. In the wide world (not to say in the
great world) it is as awkward as a devoted mistress."
Goethe, letter to Schiller, 1797, The Practical Wisdom of
Goethe, trans Stanwell and Purtscher-Wydenbruck. Allen
and Unwin 1933, p. 188
"[The word] 'Poet' must be used cautiously;
it names an aspiration, not an occupation."
Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories, Ecco Press, 1999,
p. 21
"The poets are they who see that spiritual is
greater than any material force, that thoughts rule the
world."
Emerson, Preface to Parnassus 1874
"How much there is in simply seeing! . . we
are as much as we see."
Thoreau, Journal 9 April 1841
"My father used to speak of the 'poetry of
life'; and without that poetry - that magic - [the] body may
be fed by planners and economists, but the soul dies. It is
for this that the arts exist, not as entertainment, or as a
pastime, hobby, therapy and the like, but as the living
mainstream of any civilisation."
Kathleen Raine, 'The use of poetry', Temenos Academy
Review 7, p. 21.
"An artist is one who knows how life should
always be lived at its best and is always aware of how badly
he is doing it. An artist is one who knows he is failing in
living and feeds his remorse by making something fair . . ."
Thornton Wilder, introduction to The Angel that troubled
the waters, Longmans, 1928
"Poetry teaches a man to do more than observe
merely factual errors and measurable truths . . . it compels
him to resist stock responses, because it compels him to
examine the emotional significance, as well as the rational
significance, of whatever comes under his notice."
Norman MacCaig, 'My way of it', Chapman 16 (Summer
1976). Quoted in Marjory McNeil, Norman MacCaig, a study
of his life and work, Mercat Press (1996), p. 99.