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

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When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

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The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which ...more

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No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

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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 ...more

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Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

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April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, c...more

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Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not lik...more

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The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

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As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squ...more

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I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridicu...more

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The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is n...more

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This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.