T. S. Eliot Quotes About Poetry

Quotes about: Poetry

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

  Four Quartets "Little Gidding" pt. 5 (1942)

• 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 emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Mean, Expression

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

• This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

  T. S. Eliot

  Death, Poetry, Religion

  "The Hollow Men" l. 95 (1925)

• Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspirational, Time, Poetry

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.6, Faber & Faber

• The poet's mind is in fact 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 together.

  T. S. Eliot

  Writing, Poetry, Feelings

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  T. S. Eliot

  Work, Poetry, Trying

  Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 5 (1940)

• Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

  T. S. Eliot

  Communication, Writing, Poetry

  1929 Dante.

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Feelings, May

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.149, Harvard University Press

• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

• I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

  T. S. Eliot

  Loneliness, Thinking, Poetry

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 122 (1917)

• The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Crafts, Conscious

  T.S. Eliot (2010). “The Waste Land and Other Poems”, p.92, Broadview Press

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Poetry, Feelings

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry”, p.220, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Tests, Genuine

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.209, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

  T. S. Eliot

  Voice, Poetry, Humans

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 129 (1917)

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Mean, Poetry, May

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.122, Harvard University Press

• Poetry is a mug's game.

  T. S. Eliot

  Games, Poetry, Mug

  T.S. Eliot (2016). “The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 6: 1932–1933”, p.22, Faber & Faber

• When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Done, Certain

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Notes towards the Definition of Culture”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Thinking, America, Poetry

• the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Falling In Love, Men

  T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.127, Courier Corporation

• All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Poetry, Return

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Personality, Individual Talent

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

• When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Oxygen, Poetry

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.16, HMH

• 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

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