T. E. Hulme Quotes

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The poet's pen is the true divining rod Which trembles towards the inner founts of feeling; Bringing to light and use, else hid from all, The many sweet clear sources which we have of good and beauty in our own deep bosoms; And marks the variations of all mind As does the needle.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.

There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

I'm not interested in being famous or anything, but I'm definitely interested in expressing emotions, and acting and filmmaking can be great outlets for that. Filmmaking is an incredible art.

I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within.

There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions.

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

Art is one of the sources through which the soul expresses itself and inspires others. But to express art thoroughly, one must have the inner emotions opened thoroughly.

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.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.