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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I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion. -
As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide. -
While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice. -
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy. -
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
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.