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.
T. S. Eliot
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Similar Quotes:
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Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading. -
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. -
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. -
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end. -
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
More quotes by T. S. Eliot
- I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
- Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
- All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths they become facts, or at best, part of the public character or at worst, catchwords.
- Business today consists in persuading crowds.
- The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.