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I Confess . . . That I Am Not Myself Very Much Concerned With The Question Of Influence, Or With Those Publicists Who Have Impressed Their Names Upon The Public By Catching The Morning Tide And Rowing Very Vast In The Direction In Which The Current Was Flowing; But Rather That There Should Always Be A Few Writers Preoccupied In Penetrating To The Core Of The Matter, In Trying To Arrive At The Truth And To Set It Forth, Without Too Much Hope, Without Ambition To Alter The Immediate Course Of Affairs, And Without Being Downcast Or Defeated When Nothing Appears To Ensue.

-T. S. Eliot

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I Confess . .

T. S. Eliot

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I Confess . . . That I Am Not Myself Very Much Concerned With The Question Of Influence, Or With Those Publicists Who Have Impressed Their Names Upon The Public By Catching The Morning Tide And Rowing Very Vast In The Direction In Which The Current Was Flowing; But Rather That There Should Always Be A Few Writers Preoccupied In Penetrating To The Core Of The Matter, In Trying To Arrive At The Truth And To Set It Forth, Without Too Much Hope, Without Ambition To Alter The Immediate Course Of Affairs, And Without Being Downcast Or Defeated When Nothing Appears To Ensue.

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To Justify Christian Morality Because It Provides A Foundation Of Morality, Instead Of Showing The Necessity Of Christian Morality From The Truth Of Christianity, Is A Very Dangerous Inversion.

If You Do Not Push The Boundaries, You Will Never Know Where They Are.

If You Want It You Must Obtain It By Great Labor.

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The Great Ages Did Not Contain The Best Talent, They Wasted Less.

No University Ought To Be Merely A National Institution....the Universities Should Have Their Common Ideals, They Should Have Their Common Obligations Toward Each Other. They Should Be Independent Of The Governments Of The Countries In Which They Are Situated. They Should Not Be Institutions For The Training Of An Efficient Bureaucracy, Or For Equipping Scientists To Get The Better Of Foreign Scientists; They Should Stand For The Preservation Of Learning, For The Pursuit Of Truth, And In So Far As Men Are Capable Of It, The Attainment Of Wisdom.

We Had The Experience But Missed The Meaning. And Approach To The Meaning Restores The Experience In A Different Form.

The Naming Of Cats Is A Difficult Matter. It Isn't Just One Of Your Holiday Games. You May Think At First I'm Mad As A Hatter. When I Tell You A Cat Must Have Three Different Names.

The Circle Of Our Understanding Is A Very Restricted Area.

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The Yellow Fog That Rubs Its Back Upon The Window-panes The Yellow Smoke That Rubs Its Muzzle On The Window-panes Licked Its Tongue Into The Corners Of The Evening Lingered Upon The Pools That Stand In Drains Let Fall Upon Its Back The Soot That Falls From Chimneys Slipped By The Terrace, Made A Sudden Leap And Seeing That It Was A Soft October Night Curled Once About The House, And Fell Asleep

A Condition Of Complete Simplicity (costing Not Less Than Everything)

At The Beach - Time You Enjoyed Wasting, Is Not Wasted.

Not Wasting Time

Whatever You Do, Don't Whimper, But Take The Consequences.

Here I Am, An Old Man In A Dry Month, Being Read To By A Boy, Waiting For Rain.

I Said To My Soul, Be Still, And Let The Dark Come Upon You Which Shall Be The Darkness Of God. . . . So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

The Civil War Is Not Ended: I Question Whether Any Serious Civil War Ever Does End.

A Woman Drew Her Long Black Hair Out Tight, And Fiddled Whisper Music On Those Strings, And Bats With Baby Faces In The Violet Light Whistled, And Beat Their Wings, And Crawled Head Downward Down A Blackened Wall.

Not Fare Well, But Fare Forward

Can We Only Love Something Created In Our Own Imaginations? Are We All In Fact Unloving And Unloveable? Then One Is Alone, And If One Is Alone Then Lover And Beloved Are Equally Unreal And The Dreamer Is No More Real Than His Dreams.

The Rats Are Underneath The Piles/ The Jew Is Underneath The Lot.

We Had The Experience, But We Missed The Meaning.

It's Strange That Words Are So Inadequate. Yet, Like The Asthmatic Struggling For Breath, So The Lover Must Struggle For Words.

I Do Not Believe That Any Writer Has Ever Exposed This Bovarysme, The Human Will To See Things As They Are Not, More Clearly Than Shakespeare.

All Time Is Eternal, Moving Inexorably Toward An End Which We Believe Is A Result Of Our Actions, But Over Which Our Control Is Mere Illusion.

If You Start With A Bang, You Won't End With A Whimper.

Words Move, Music Moves Only In Time; But That Which Is Only Living Can Only Die. Words, After Speech, Reach Into The Silence. Only By The Form, The Pattern, Can Words Or Music Reach The Stillness.

If You Find Examples Of Humanism Which Are Anti-religious, Or At Least In Opposition To The Religious Faith Of The Place And Time, Then Such Humanism Is Purely Destructive, For It Has Never Found Anything To Replace What It Has Destroyed.

Everyone Gets The Experience. Some Get The Lesson.

For Last Year's Words Belong To Last Year's Language And Next Year's Words Await Another Voice.

The Greatest Proof Of Christianity For Others Is Not How Far A Man Can Logically Analyze His Reasons For Believing, But How Far In Practice He Will Stake His Life On His Belief.

I Should Have Been A Pair Of Ragged Claws/ Scuttling Across The Floors Of Silent Seas.

At The Still Point Of The Turning World. Neither Flesh Nor Fleshless; Neither From Nor Towards; At The Still Point, There The Dance Is, But Neither Arrest Nor Movement. And Do Not All It Fixity, Where Past And Future Are Gathered. Neither Movement From Nor Towards, Neither Ascent Nor Decline. Except For The Point, The Still Point, There Would Be No Dance, And There Is Only The Dance.

When War Is Not Just It Is Subsequently Justified; So It Becomes Many Things. In Reality, An Unjust War Is Merely Piracy. It Consists Of Piracy, Ego And, More Than Anything, Money. War Is Our Century's Prostitution.

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Our High Respect For A Well Read Person Is Praise Enough For Literature.

And Right Action Is Freedom From Past And Future Also.

I Must Say Bernard Shaw Is Greatly Improved By Music.

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I Believe The Moment Of Birth Is When We Have Knowledge Of Death I Believe The Season Of Birth Is The Season Of Sacrifice.

So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

Think Not Forever Of Yourselves, O Chiefs, Nor Of Your Own Generation. Think Of Continuing Generations Of Our Families, Think Of Our Grandchildren And Of Those Yet Unborn, Whose Faces Are Coming From Beneath The Ground.

Native American

Amongst The Rock One Cannot Stop Or Think

Gradually We Come To Admit That Shakespeare Understands A Greater Extent And Variety Of Human Life Than Dante; But That Dante Understands Deeper Degrees Of Degradation And Higher Degrees Of Exaltation.

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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 The First Time.

The Remarkable Thing About Television Is That It Permits Several Million People To Laugh At The Same Joke And Still Feel Lonely.

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Artistic Inevitability Lies In The Complete Adequacy Of The External To The Emotion.

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And Voices Singing Out Of Empty Cisterns And Exhausted Wells.

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I Am Glad You Have A Cat, But I Do Not Believe It Is So Remarkable A Cat As My Cat.

You Will Find That You Survive Humiliation. And That's An Experience Of Incalculable Value.

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Every End Is A Beginning...and Every Beginning Is An End.

No Place Of Grace For Those Who Avoid The Face. No Time To Rejoice For Those Who Walk Among Noise And Deny The Voice.

The Good Poet Welds His Theft Into A Whole Of Feeling Which Is Unique, Utterly Different From That From Which It Was Torn; The Bad Poet Throws It Into Something Which Has No Cohesion.

No Artist Produces Great Art By A Deliberate Attempt To Express His Own Personality.

Shall I Part My Hair Behind Do I Dare To Eat A Peach I Shall Wear White Flannel Trousers, And Walk Upon The Beach. I Have Heard The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each. I Do Not Think That They Will Sing To Me.

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Those Who Talk Of The Bible As A Monument Of English Prose Are Merely Admiring It As A Monument Over The Grave Of Christianity.

Only By Acceptance Of The Past, Can You Alter It

Words Strain, Crack, And Sometime Break, Under The Burden.

There Is Not A More Repulsive Spectacle Than On Old Man Who Will Not Forsake The World, Which Has Already Forsaken Him.

That Is Not It At All, That Is Not What I Meant, At All.

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A Tradition Without Intelligence Is Not Worth Having.

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Every Phrase And Every Sentence Is An End And A Beginning, Every Poem An Epitaph.

Distracted From Distraction By Distraction

The Past And Future / Are Conquered, And Reconciled.

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Where There Is No Temple There Shall Be No Homes.

We Must Learn To Suffer More.

Envy Is Everywhere. Who Is Without Envy? And Most People Are Unaware Or Unashamed Of Being Envious.

Old Men Ought To Be Explorers.

Someone Said, 'the Dead Writers Are Remote From Us Because We Know So Much More Than They Did.' Precisely, And They Are That Which We Know.

I Suspect That In Our Loathing Of Totalitarianism, There Is Infused A Good Deal Of Admiration For Its Efficiency.

People Are Only Influenced In The Direction In Which They Want To Go, And Influence Consists Largely In Making Them Conscious Of Their Wishes To Proceed In That Direction.

Bad Poets Imitate, Good Poets Steal.

We Ask Only To Be Reassured About The Noises In The Cellar And The Window That Should Not Have Been Open

The True Church Can Never Fail. For It Is Based Upon A Rock.

Those Who Say They Give The Public What It Wants Begin By Underestimating Public Taste And End By Debauching It.

There Is No Feeling, Except The Extremes Of Fear And Grief, That Does Not Find Relief In Music.

If All Time Is Eternally Present, All Time Is Unredeemable

I Grow Old … I Grow Old … I Shall Wear The Bottoms Of My Trousers Rolled.

There's No Vocabulary For Love Within A Family, Love That's Lived In But Not Looked At, Love Within The Light Of Which All Else Is Seen, The Love Within Which All Other Love Finds Speech. This Love Is Silent.

There Is No Escape From Metre; There Is Only Mastery.

Men Tighten The Knot Of Confusion Into Perfect Misunderstanding.

Where Does One Go From A World Of Insanity? Somewhere On The Other Side Of Despair.

Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait Without Thought, For You Are Not Ready For Thought: So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness Be Dancing. Whisper Of Running Streams, And Winter Lightning. The Wild Thyme Unseen And The Wild Strawberry, The Laughter In The Garden, Echoed Ecstasy Not Lost, But Requiring, Pointing To The Agony Of Death And Birth.

And Indeed There Will Be Time For The Yellow Smoke That Slides Along The Street Rubbing Its Back Upon The Window-panes; There Will Be Time , There Will Be Time To Prepare A Face To Meet The Faces That You Meet; There Will Be Time To Murder And Create, And Time For All The Works And Days Of Hands That Lift And Drop A Question On Your Plate; Time For You And Time For Me, And Time Yet For A Hundred Indecisions, And For A Hundred Visions And Revisions, Before The Taking Of Toast And Tea.

And Through The Spaces Of The Dark Midnight Shakes The Memory As A Madman Shakes A Dead Geranium.

...the Still Point In A Turning World.

To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning.

In My Beginning Is My End. In Succession Houses Rise And Fall, Crumble, Are Extended, Are Removed, Destroyed, Restored, Or In Their Place Is An Open Field, Or A Factory, Or A By-pass. Old Stone To New Building, Old Timber To New Fires, Old Fires To Ashes, And Ashes To The Earth Which Is Already Flesh, Fur And Faeces, Bone Of Man And Beast, Cornstalk And Leaf.

The Majority Of Poems One Outgrows And Outlives, As One Outgrows And Outlives The Majority Of Human Passions.

And All Shall Be Well And/ All Manner Of Thing Shall Be Well/ By The Purification Of The Motive/ In The Ground Of Our Beseeching

You Must Not On Any Account Give Me Credit For Being Penetrating. I Have Impressed People That Way Before, And The Result Is Always Disaster.

They Don't Understand What It Is To Be Awake, / To Be Living On Several Planes At Once / Though One Cannot Speak With Several Voices At Once.

It Is In Fact A Part Of The Function Of Education To Help Us Escape, Not From Our Own Time - For We Are Bound By That - But From The Intellectual And Emotional Limitations Of Our Time.

And Now You Live Dispersed On Ribbon Roads, And No Man Knows Or Cares Who Is His Neighbor Unless His Neighbor Makes Too Much Disturbance, But All Dash To And Fro In Motor Cars, Familiar With The Roads And Settled Nowhere.

Sometimes Things Become Possible If We Want Them Bad Enough.

My Name Is Only An Anagram Of Toilets.

I Am Moved By Fancies That Are Curled, Around These Images And Cling, The Notion Of Some Infinitely Gentle, Infinitely Suffering Thing.

We Have Lingered In The Chambers Of The Sea By Sea-girls Wreathed With Seaweed Red And Brown Till Human Voices Wake Us... And We Drown.

I Have Heard The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each. I Do Not Think That They Will Sing To Me.

Fading, Fading: Strength Beyond Hope And Despair Climbing The Third Stair. Lord, I Am Not Worthy Lord, I Am Not Worthy But Speak The Word Only.

Webster Was Much Possessed By Death And Saw The Skull Beneath The Skin.

I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust." T.s. Eliot We Don't Actually Fear Death, We Fear That No One Will Notice Our Absence, That We Will Disappear Without A Trace.

Upon The Glazen Shelves Kept Watch Matthew And Waldo, Guardians Of The Faith The Army Of Unalterable Law.

I Said To My Soul, Be Still And Wait Without Hope, For Hope Would Be Hope For The Wrong Thing; Wait Without Love, For Love Would Be Love Of The Wrong Thing; There Is Yet Faith, But The Faith And The Love Are All In The Waiting. Wait Without Thought, For You Are Not Ready For Thought: So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

I Have A Gumbie Cat In Mind, Her Name Is Jennyanydots;her Coat Is One Of The Tabby Kind,with Tiger Stripes And Lepard Spots.

Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color, Paralyzed Force, Gesture Without Motion; Those Who Have Crossed With Direct Eyes, To Death's Other Kingdom Remember Us-if At All-not As Lost Violent Souls, But Only As The Hollow Men The Stuffed Men.

The More Perfect The Artist, The More Completely Separate In Him Will Be The Man Who Suffers And The Mind Which Creates.

If The Lost Word Is Lost, If The Spent Word Is Spent If The Unheard, Unspoken Word Is Unspoken, Unheard; Still Is The Spoken Word, The Word Unheard, The Word Without A Word, The Word Within The World And For The World; And The Light Shone In The Darkness And Against The Word The Unstilled World Still Whirled About The Center Of The Silent Word. Oh My People, What Have I Done Unto Thee. Where Shall The Word Be Found, Where Shall The Word Resound? Not Here, There Is Not Enough Silence

This Is The Feeling For Syllable And Rhythm, Penetrating Far Below The Conscious Levels Of Thought And Feeling, Invigorating Every Word.

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 Poets Steal Bad Poets Deface What They Take And Good Poets Make It Into Something Better Or At Least Something Different. The Good Poet Welds His Theft Into A Whole Of Feeling Which Is Unique Utterly Different Than That From Which It Is Torn The Bad Poet Throws It Into Something Which Has No Cohesion. A Good Poet Will Usually Borrow From Authors Remote In Time Or Alien In Language Or Diverse In Interest.

Stealing Things

Think Neither Fear Nor Courage Saves Us. Unnatural Vices Are Fathered By Our Heroism. Virtues Are Forced Upon Us By Our Impudent Crimes. These Tears Are Shaken From The Wrath-bearing Tree.

But It Seems That Something Has Happened That Has Never Happened Before; Though We Know Not Just When, Or Why, Or How, Or Where. Men Have Left God Not For Gods, They Say, But For No Gods; And This Has Never Happened Before. That Men Both Deny Gods And Worship Gods, Professing First Reason, And The Money, And Power, And What They Call Life, Or Race, Or Dialect.the Church Disowned, The Tower Overthrown, The Bells Upturned, What Have We To Do But Stand With Empty Hands And Palms Upturned In An Age Which Advances Progressively Backwards?

We Can At Least Try To Understand Our Own Motives, Passions, And Prejudices, So As To Be Conscious Of What We Are Doing When We Apeal To Those Of Others. This Is Very Difficult, Because Our Own Prejudice And Emotional Bias Always Seems To Us So Rational.

Probably, Indeed, The Larger Part Of The Labor Of An Author Composing His Work Is Critical Labor; The Labor Of Sifting, Combining, Constructing, Expunging, Correcting, Testing. This Frightful Toil Is As Much Critical As Creative.

When A Cat Adopts You, And I Am Not Superstitious At All I Don't Mean Only Black Cats There Is Nothing To Be Done About It Except To Put Up With It And Wait Until The Wind Changes.

Now That The Lilacs Are In Bloom She Has A Bowl Of Lilacs In Her Room

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Think Now History Has Many Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors And Issues, Deceives With Whispering Ambitions Guides Us By Vanities.

There Will Be Time, There Will Be Time To Prepare A Face To Meet The Faces That You Meet.

Our Difficulties Of The Moment Must Always Be Dealt With Somehow, But Our Permanent Difficulties Are Difficulties Of Every Moment.

The Bad Poet Is Usually Unconscious Where He Ought To Be Conscious, And Conscious Where He Ought To Be Unconscious.

Home Is Where One Starts From. As We Grow Older The World Becomes Stranger, The Pattern More Complicatied Of Dead And Living, Not The Intense Moment Isolated, With No Before And After, But A Lifetime Burning In Every Moment . . .

Intense Moments

Signs Are Taken For Wonders. / 'we Would See A Sign!' / The Word Within A Word, Unable To Speak A Word, / Swaddled With Darkness.

Can We Only Love Something Created In Our Own Imaginations?

The Name That No Human Research Can Discover-- But The Cat Himself Knows, And Will Never Confess. When You Notice A Cat In Profound Meditation, The Reason, I Tell You, Is Always The Same: His Mind Is Engaged In A Rapt Contemplation Of The Thought, Of The Thought, Of The Thought Of His Name: His Ineffable Effable Effanineffable Deep And Inscrutable Singular Name.

Playwriting Gets Into Your Blood And You Can't Stop It. At Least Not Until The Producers Or The Public Tell You To.

The Lot Of Man Is Ceaseless Labor, Or Ceaseless Idleness, Which Is Still Harder.

In Spite Of All The Dishonour, The Broken Standards, The Broken Lives, The Broken Faith In One Place Or Another, There Was Something Left That Was More Than The Tales Of Old Men On Winter Evenings.

Poets In Our Civilization, As It Exists At Present, Must Be Difficult...the Poet Must Become More And More Comprehensive, More Allusive, More Indirect, In Order To Force, To Dislocate If Necessary, Language Into Its Meaning.

As A Rule, With Me An Unfinished [idea] Is A Thing That Might As Well Be Rubbed Out. It's Better, If There's Something Good In It That I Might Make Use Of Elsewhere, To Leave It At The Back Of My Mind Than On Paper In A Drawer. If I Leave It In A Drawer It Remains The Same Thing But If It's In The Memory It Becomes Transformed Into Something Else.

We Have All Our Private Terrors, Our Particular Shadows, Our Secret Fears. We Are Afraid In A Fear Which We Cannot Face, Which None Understands, And Our Hearts Are Torn From Us, Our Brains Unskinned Like The Layers Of An Onion, Ourselves The Last.

The Communication Of The Dead Is Tongued With Fire Beyond The Language Of The Living.

Some Editors Are Failed Writers, But So Are Most Writers.

Before A Cat Will Condescend To Treat You As A Trusted Friend, Some Little Token Of Esteem Is Needed, Like A Dish Of Cream.

We Can Say Of Shakespeare, That Never Has A Man Turned So Little Knowledge To Such Great Account.

No Scheme For A Change Of Society Can Be Made To Appear Immediately Palatable, Except By Falsehood, Until Society Has Become So Desperate That It Will Accept Any Change.

For You Know Only A Heap Of Broken Images

The Journey, Not The Destination Matters.

When A Great Poet Has Lived, Certain Things Have Been Done Once For All, And Cannot Be Achieved Again.

An Election Is Coming. Universal Peace Is Declared And The Foxes Have A Sincere Interest In Prolonging The Lives Of The Poultry.

The Immature Poet Imitates, The Mature Poet Plagiarizes.

A Heap Of Broken Images, Where The Sun Beats, And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter, The Cricket No Relief, And The Dry Stone No Sound Of Water. Only There Is Shadow Under This Red Rock, (come In Under The Shadow Of This Red Rock), And I Will Show You Something Different From Either Your Shadow At Morning Striding Behind You Or Your Shadow At Evening Rising To Meet You; I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust.

No! I Am Not Prince Hamlet, Nor Was Meant To Be; Am An Attendant Lord, One That Will Do To Swell A Progress, Start A Scene Or Two, Advise The Prince; No Doubt, An Easy Tool, Deferential, Glad To Be Of Use, Politic, Cautious, And Meticulous; Full Of High Sentence, But A Bit Obtuse; At Times, Indeed, Almost Ridiculous— Almost, At Times, The Fool.

A Thousand Policemen Directing Traffic Cannot Tell You Why You Come Or Where You Go.

Birth, And Copulation, And Death; That's All The Facts When You Come To Brass Tacks.

Turn Things You've Always Wanted To Do, Into Things You've Done

I Love Reading Another Reader’s List Of Favorites. Even When I Find I Do Not Share Their Tastes Or Predilections, I Am Provoked To Compare, Contrast, And Contradict. It Is A Most Healthy Exercise, And One Altogether Fruitful.

Philosophy: A Purple Bullfinch In A Lilac Tree.

Let Us Go Then, You And I, When The Evening Is Spread Out Against The Sky

Again I Must Remind You That A Dog's A Dog-a Cat's A Cat.

Love Compels Cruelty To Those Who Do Not Understand Love.

Only Those Who Will Risk Going Too Far Can Possibly Find Out How Far One Can Go.

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 Which We Rarely Penetrate; For Our Lives Are Mostly A Constant Evasion Of Ourselves.

The Only Wisdom We Can Hope To Acquire Is The Wisdom Of Humility: Humility Is Endless. The Houses Are All Gone Under The Sea. The Dancers Are All Gone Under The Hill.

There Are Three Conditions Which Often Look Alike Yet Differ Completely, Flourish In The Same Hedgerow: Attachment To Self And To Things And To Persons, Detachment From Self And From Things And From Persons; And, Growing Between Them, Indifference, ... .

Most Of The Evil In This World Is Done By People With Good Intentions.

Accident Is Design / And Design Is Accident / In A Cloud Of Unknowing.

Men Have Left God Not For Other Gods, They Say, But For No God; And This Has Never Happened Before.

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?

I've Been Born, And Once Is Enough.

With Cats, Some Say, One Rule Is True: Don’t Speak Till You Are Spoken To. Myself, I Do Not Hold With That — I Say, You Should Ad-dress A Cat. But Always Keep In Mind That He Resents Familiarity. I Bow, And Taking Off My Hat, Ad-dress Him In This Form: O Cat! But If He Is The Cat Next Door, Whom I Have Often Met Before (he Comes To See Me In My Flat) I Greet Him With An Oopsa Cat! I Think I've Heard Them Call Him James — But We've Not Got So Far As Names.

All Dash To And Fro In Motor Cars. Familiar With The Roads And Settled Nowhere.

Hell Is Oneself, Hell Is Alone, The Other Figures In It Merely Projections. There Is Nothing To Escape From And Nothing To Escape To. One Is Always Alone.

Dear Mother, I Am Getting On Nicely In My Work At The Bank, And Like It ... I Want To Find Out Something About The Science Of Money While I Am At It; It Is An Extraordinarily Interesting Subject.

In Life There Is Not Time To Grieve Long.

Each Venture Is A New Beginning, A Raid On The Inarticulate With Shabby Equipment Always Deteriorating In The General Mess Of Imprecision Of Feeling.

If You Desire To Drain To The Dregs The Fullest Cup Of Scorn And Hatred That A Fellow Human Being Can Pour Out For You, Let A Young Mother Hear You Call Dear Baby 'it.'

One Thing You Cannot Know: The Sudden Extinction Of Every Alternative, The Unexpected Crash Of The Iron Cataract. You Do Not Know What Hope Is, Until You Have Lost It. You Only Know What It Is Not To Hope: You Do Not Know What It Is To Have Hope Taken From You Or To Fling It Away, To Join The Legion Of The Hopeless Unrecognized By Other Men, Though Sometimes By Each Other.

Every Nation, Every Race, Has Not Only Its Own Creative, But Its Own Critical Turn Of Mind; And Is Even More Oblivious Of The Shortcomings And Limitations Of Its Critical Habits Than Of Those Of Its Creative Genius.

Here Were Decent Godless People; Their Only Monument The Asphalt Road And A Thousand Lost Golf Balls.

There Is No Absolute Point Of View From Which Real And Ideal Can Be Finally Separated And Labelled.

If We Are Moved By A Poem, It Has Meant Something, Perhaps Something Important, To Us; If We Are Not Moved, Then It Is, As Poetry, Meaningless.

The Only Way Of Expressing Emotion In The Form Of Art Is By Finding An "objective Correlative"; In Other Words, A Set Of Objects, A Situation, A Chain Of Events Which Shall Be The Formula For That Particular Emotion; Such That When The External Facts, Which Must Terminate In Sensory Experience, Are Given, The Emotion Is Immediately Evoked.

The Dripping Blood Our Only Drink, The Bloody Flesh Our Only Food: In Spite Of Which We Like To Think That We Are Sound, Substantial Flesh And Blood Again, In Spite Of That, We Call This Friday Good.

It's Not Wise To Violate Rules Until You Know How To Observe Them.

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 Wasted His Time And Messed Up His Life For Nothing.

Business Today Consists In Persuading Crowds.

Time Present And Time Past Are Both Perhaps Present In Time Future, And Time Future Contained In Time Past. If All Time Is Eternally Present All Time Is Unredeemable.

The Young Feel Tired At The End Of An Action, The Old At The Beginning.

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.

Stealing Things

We Learn What Poetry Is - If We Ever Learn - By Reading It.

And The End And The Beginning Were Always There Before The Beginning And After The End.

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 Know What It Would Be Like But I Think It Would Be A Rather Troublesome Distraction To Have Such A Lot Of Dominating Presences, As You Call Them, About. Fortunately We Weren't Bothered By Each Other.

Tennyson And Browning Are Poets, And They Think; But They Do Not Feel Their Thought As Immediately As The Odour Of A Rose. A Thought To Donne Was An Experience; It Modified His Sensibility.

One Starts An Action Simply Because One Must Do Something.

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 Which What Is Ordinarily Only Felt Is Transformed Into Thought Without Ceasing To Be Feeling.

Humor Is Also A Way Of Saying Something Serious.

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 Time A Poet May Become Merely Reader In Respect To His Own Works, Forgetting His Original Meaning.

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