T. S. Eliot Quotes

The poet's labors are a work of joy, and require peace of mind.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

The true poet dreams being awake.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.

I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

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.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him.

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

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.

While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.