“Nothing that an Englishman has to say in verse can be better said by means of an imitation of French form and spirit, than it can through English form and in an English spirit.”

Defending an authentic native voice against fashionable imitation · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“That spirit is not to be caught by such devices.”

Arguing that genuine artistic spirit cannot be reproduced by superficial imitation · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Truth

“It is of no use wasting time on such people.”

Counselling writers not to expend energy on prejudiced or insincere critics · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Time

“If he has not, I believe he will be found out, and that very quickly.”

Trusting readers ultimately to recognise emptiness beneath pretension · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Poetry
• Truth

“The one hope of literature lies in the fact that if a poet writes obscurely, he nevertheless has some meaning, though it may be ill expressed.”

Distinguishing difficult expression from the absence of genuine meaning · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Hope
• Poetry
• Truth

“A good honest collection of conundrums would be equally profitable and less mistaken.”

A humorous dismissal of poetry valued mainly as an intellectual puzzle · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“Obscure poems, obscure in subject or in treatment, can never be poetry at all, can never awake a noble emotion, or stimulate the heart or the soul.”

Insisting that poetry should communicate strongly enough to move its reader · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Poetry
• Truth

“No more certain sign of the decadence of a literature and of a nation can be imagined, as every student of classical literature knows well.”

Connecting literary obscurity with broader cultural decline · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Time

“Of the modern vice of obscurity I can hardly bring myself to speak, because for the moment the merit of a poem is by many excellent people measured by its obscurity.”

Rejecting the notion that difficulty is itself evidence of poetic merit · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Poetry
• Truth

“The only way to make a long poem palatable to modern tastes is to break it up into a number of brief connected episodes.”

Advocating manageable structure for extended poetic narratives · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“In verse, at any rate, the half is far more than the whole.”

A compact statement of his belief in compression and restraint · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“It is impossible for a poet to live in more than a selection of his works.”

Suggesting that literary survival ultimately depends on a poet's strongest work · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Fame
• Poetry
• Time

“The lines of a well-known romantic poem are to be counted by myriads.”

Wryly objecting to the immense scale of some contemporary verse · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“Adonais" itself would have been twice as effective if half as long.”

A characteristically provocative argument for poetic compression · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“Not merely do important poems of a heroic character expand into portly volumes, but even the lyric, which above all should be brief and inspiring, becomes enormously lengthy.”

Defending brevity as a particular virtue of lyric poetry · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“But the length and bulk of modern poems seem to be increasing by leaps and bounds.”

Criticising the tendency towards excessive poetic length · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“Life is somewhat longer, it is true, than it was a century ago, but not very much.”

A dry reminder that readers still possess limited time · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Mortality
• Time

“And the list of motives will surely grow larger and more complex with time, even though there seem for the moment no one to treat them.”

Anticipating new subjects as human life becomes more complex · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Hope
• Poetry
• Time

“It is absurd to suppose that there can ever be any lack of subjects, so long as man has a history, so long as there are passions - love and hate, and greed and lust, and jealousy - in the world.”

Finding enduring poetic material in history and human passion · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Love
• Poetry
• Time

“There is no lack of great subjects, nor ever has been.”

Expressing confidence in the inexhaustible material available to poets · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Hope
• Poetry

“I think, too, we might fairly expect to have the preliminary question well weighed, how far the proposed work is likely to be of human interest.”

Putting human interest at the heart of choosing a poetic subject · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Poetry
• Truth

“There is one initial defect in much poetry, both of the past and present, which I sincerely hope the poet of the future will avoid.”

Calling on future poets to learn from weaknesses in earlier writing · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Hope
• Poetry
• Time

“But there is very little more need for rhyme - there is some, no doubt - in English than in Latin or in Greek, and I hope to see it used with much greater economy than it is now.”

Arguing that rhythm matters more fundamentally than rhyme · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry

“My own idea is that rhythm is an absolute necessity in a poem, which is indeed neither more nor less than a combination of words, having a certain metrical or rhythmical order, composed for the purpose of exciting noble emotion.”

Defining poetry through rhythm and its power to awaken elevated feeling · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

• Art
• Poetry