When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered.
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.
No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.
All dash to and fro in motor cars. Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
What we know of other people’s only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.
Because I know that time is always time and place is always place and only place. And what is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place. I rejoice that things are as they are.
To make an end is to make a beginning.
Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.
In the last few years everything I’d done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.