“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts.”

Rejecting posterity as the sole test of a poem's worth · The Forms of Poetry, 1926

• Judgement
• Poetry
• Posterity

“Art itself is nothing more than a reaction to as well as a record of the things one loves or hates, and criticism is merely an annotated explanation of these likes and dislikes.”

Admitting that taste, not impersonality, drives both making and judging · Preface, American Poetry Since 1900

• Art
• Criticism
• Taste

“It is the non-conformers, the innovators in art, science, technology, and human relations who, misunderstood and ridiculed in their own times, have shaped our world.”

A late defence of experiment against the comfort of convention · Article, New York Times, 1970s

• Art
• Innovation
• Rebellion

“What most of us don't realize is that everyone loves poetry.”

Defending poetry as a popular pleasure, not a highbrow specialty · Interview remark, reported in the Washington Post

• Pleasure
• Poetry
• Readers

“Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.”

Treating friendship as clear-sighted loyalty rather than uncritical affection · Autobiography, From Another World, 1939

• Faith
• Friendship
• Love

“Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.”

A compact definition of poetry as memorable speech for what cannot otherwise be fixed · The Pursuit of Poetry, 1969

• Definition
• Memory
• Poetry

“The imagination is the instrument of poetry.”

Treating imaginative vision as central to poetic creation · Essay on poetry (commonly attributed)

• Art
• Poetry

“A poet must be a passionate lover of language.”

Linking poetic achievement with an intense attention to words · Literary criticism (commonly attributed)

• Beauty
• Poetry

“The poet is a man who puts up a fight against the obvious.”

Presenting poetry as resistance to habitual ways of seeing · Essay on poetry (commonly attributed)

• Poetry
• Truth

“The poet is not a man who says things, but one who makes things happen.”

Emphasising poetry’s active effect on readers and the world · Literary criticism (commonly attributed)

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is the art of saying more and more with less and less.”

A concise account of poetry’s power to compress meaning into language · Literary criticism (commonly attributed)

• Art
• Poetry