Poetic Originality Quotes

A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

In expressing so completely his own type, Mr. Yeats presents us with the case for integrity. If we can express eventually our own scholastic mentality in verse, I believe that our art will lead us not towards, but away from, English art.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.

Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.

Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold