T. S. Eliot Quotes

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

You can't write poetry on the computer.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

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.

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

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

I like to write about things that are dark or twisted. Where the poetry seems to be is when you start in the dark and reach for the light - that's what makes it not depressing to me.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

Any time is the time to make a poem.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.