This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

To resist the social pressure now put even on one’s leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one’s own way, than ever before.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the...

I don’t answer questions about conjectures.

…but [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.

When the immense drugged universe explodesIn a cascade of unendurable colourAnd leaves us gasping naked,This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal loveWhich alone, as we know...

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not...

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either

I happened to notice that among the men who had willingly presented themselves for jury-service was one whom I knew to be the father of seven children. Under a law of Augustus’s he was exempt...

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

I love, therefore I am.

Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.

Genius’ was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable...

Poets can’t march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that’s against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that’s what it’ll get. One should never protest...

It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch’s wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One...

Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.

But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man in generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be...

I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit...