T. S. Eliot Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspirational, New Year, New Beginnings

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.150, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Unique, Stealing Things

• Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

  T. S. Eliot

  Time, Judging, Able

• A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

  T. S. Eliot

  Artist, Immature, Aliens

  T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.72, Courier Corporation

• Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

  T. S. Eliot

  Helping, Language, Should

• The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Communication, Fire

  Four Quartets "Little Gidding" pt. 1 (1942)

• Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Literature, Language

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Order, Civilization, Language

  "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921)

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