Literature and Words

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense.

Rhyme being … but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre.

Whatsoever he [Shakespeare] penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’.

Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

How far thou didst our Lyly outshine,

I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

EASY READING IS DAMN HARD WRITING.

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

ONE HATES AN AUTHOR THAT’S ALL AUTHOR.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, brief, and can do damage.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’ . . . In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.