T. S. Eliot Poetry Quotations

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.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

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.

Poetry is a mug's game.

Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

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.

When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.

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.