T. S. Eliot Quotes

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."

In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.

Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.

Music is an experience, not a science.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.