Great Throughts Treasury

"One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns."

"One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time."

"Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work."

"People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf."

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets."

"Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols."

"Rhythm must have meaning."

"Secrets of the Federal Reserve."

"Small talk comes from small bones."

"Poetry must be as well written as prose."

"Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art."

"Song in the Manner of Housman: O woe, woe, people are born and die, we also shall be dead pretty soon therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree but he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera..."

"Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe."

"The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people."

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

"Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."

"Speak against unconscious oppression, speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, speak against bonds."

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet black bough."

"The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort."

"The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth."

"The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement."

"The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in re-measurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means."

"The eyes of this dead lady speak to me for here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me."

"The Garden: En robe de parade. Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall she walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, and she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, and is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion."

"The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot."

"The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand."

"The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."

"The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts."

"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."

"The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting."

"The Lake Isle: O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, with the little bright boxes piled up neatly upon the shelves and the loose fragrant Cavendish and the shag, and the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases, and a pair of scales not too greasy, and the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing, for a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, lend me a little tobacco-shop, or install me in any profession save this damnÂ’d profession of writing, where one needs oneÂ’s brains all the time."

"The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner."

"The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation."

"The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!"

"The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people."

"The rich have butlers and no friends."

"The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories."

"The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention."

"The temple is holy because it is not for sale."

"The thought of what America would be like if the Classics had a wide circulation troubles my sleep."

"There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle ''promise'' from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed."

"There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent."

"The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."

"There is no form of platitudes that cannot be easily converted into iambic pentameter. If a person has learned to count to ten, it is not difficult to start a new line with each syllable of the eleventh or repel every second syllable accented."

"There is no reason why the same man should like the same book at eighteen and at forty-eight."

"There is no topic ... more soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation."

"There is the subtler music, the clear light where time burns back about th'eternal embers. We are not shut from the thousand heavens: Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen, folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid, bulwarks of beryl and of chrysophrase. Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee Nature herself's turned metaphysical, who can look at that blue and not believe?"