--I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmic creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.

Edgar Allan Poe
from The Poetic Principle


--Genuine Poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
T. S. Eliot

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
T. S. Eliot

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot

April is the cruellest month.
T. S. Eliot

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
T. S. Eliot

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
T. S. Eliot

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T. S. Eliot


Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot


Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
TS Eliot



The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. Eliot


The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. Eliot