“The perfect balance between the heart and the mind, the body and the spirit, is still to be attained.”

Reflecting on the unresolved struggle to reconcile emotion, reason, body and spirit · Preface to revised edition, The Answering Voice, 1928

• Love
• Truth

“Though the passion called love has not changed appreciably during recorded time, our ideas about it have changed constantly, and sometimes with great rapidity.”

Distinguishing the enduring emotion of love from changing social ideas about it · Preface to revised edition, The Answering Voice, 1928

• Love
• Time

“Teachers and parents alike have come to feel that the love of poetry in general is more to be desired for children than the knowledge of certain “well known” poems.”

Putting a lasting love of poetry above prescribed literary knowledge · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Love
• Poetry

“We who have seen how poetry has come to our rescue with its delight, its healing, and its new courage in times of stress and sorrow, know that it is an inestimable possession.”

Celebrating poetry as a source of delight, healing and courage · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Hope
• Joy
• Poetry

“They enjoyed certain sad poems as much as merry ones, but meditative, moralistic and gloomy poems were never read but once, if they were read at all.”

Observing that children can welcome sadness while rejecting ponderous instruction · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Joy
• Poetry

“I have been guided from first to last by their enjoyment or their boredom.”

Putting a child's genuine response ahead of adult literary prescription · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Joy
• Poetry

“In selecting the poems for the girl and boy who used to be, I have tried always to read with their eyes.”

Describing an imaginative return to childhood as her principle of selection · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Memory
• Poetry

“It was the little books that became our intimate companions.”

Remembering how modest volumes of poetry became treasured childhood companions · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Friendship
• Poetry

“Above all things I have striven to keep the book small, for the big books of poetry on our shelves were always left to themselves.”

Arguing that a manageable collection can invite a more intimate relationship with poetry · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Poetry

“Every anthologist must adopt some plan for making selections. Mine has been very simple.”

Introducing her deliberately personal approach to choosing poems · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Art
• Poetry

“The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading.”

Capturing her ideal of poetry as immediate, concentrated emotional experience · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“Every beat of his rhythm, the color of each word, the ring of each rhyme, must carry his poem, as a well-laid railway track carries a train of cars, smoothly to its destination.”

Comparing successful poetic technique to an unseen structure carrying the reader forward · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“Every word, every syllable, must be an unobtrusive and yet an indispensable part of his creation.”

Insisting that poetic economy makes every element necessary · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“The warmth of the idea that generated the poem should make it clear, ductile, a finished creation, before it touches cold white paper.”

Presenting composition as an inward shaping process before transcription · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“They are far more fluid before they touch ink and paper than they ever are afterward.”

Describing the freedom a poem possesses while it remains in the imagination · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“Brief lyrical poems should be moulded in the poet's mind.”

Arguing that short lyrics should largely take shape before being written · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“The poet who chooses this older, more melodic music, and the regular chiming of the rhymes that usually goes with it, should use great care to vary these deftly and spontaneously.”

Counselling subtle variation when working within traditional rhyme and metre · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“For generations readers have been accustomed to certain forms of rhythms and to certain rhyme-schemes.”

Recognising the accumulated familiarity of traditional poetic forms · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Music
• Poetry

“He should be conscious only of emotions given him, and unconscious of the medium by which they are transmitted.”

Making emotional experience rather than technique the reader's chief awareness · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“The reader should be barely conscious of the form, the rhymes or the rhythm.”

Advocating unobtrusive poetic technique · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“The form, as form, should be engrossing neither to the poet nor to the reader.”

Rejecting technique that draws attention away from the poem itself · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry

“The form of the poem should be a clear window-pane through which you see the poem's heart.”

Expressing her ideal that form should reveal rather than obscure feeling · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“In my own case the rhythm of a poem usually follows, in a general way, the rhythm of the first line.”

Revealing how the opening line often determines her poem's musical structure · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Music
• Poetry

“The first line comes floating toward him with a charming definiteness of color and music.”

Evoking the mysterious arrival of a poem's opening line · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

• Beauty
• Music
• Poetry