“We might even, in time, come to think it possible to enjoy the naked beauty of a statue or a picture without any virtuous vision behind it of a filthy fancy; which would be immoral.”

Ironically attacking prudish interpretations of beauty in art · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Art
• Beauty

“I do not deprecate, but demand for all men freedom to speak and freedom to hear.”

A forceful defence of freedom of expression and reception · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Truth

“Then the press will be as impotent as the pulpit to dictate the laws and remove the landmarks of art; and those will be laughed at who demand from one thing the qualities of another—who seek for sermons in sonnets and morality in music.”

Defending artistic independence from moral and journalistic prescription · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“I have never worked for praise or pay, but simply by impulse, and to please myself.”

Describing artistic creation as internally rather than commercially motivated · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Art
• Fame

“Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.”

Giving Sappho the highest possible praise as a poetic artist · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Art
• Fame
• Poetry

“No one can feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work.”

An unusually direct acknowledgement of artistic limitation · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Art
• Poetry

“I neither hope nor wish to change the unchangeable, to purify the impure.”

Refusing to waste effort on those he considered beyond persuasion · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Truth

“Were each poem to be accepted as the deliberate outcome and result of the writer's conviction, not mine alone but most other men's verses would leave nothing behind them but a sense of cloudy chaos and suicidal contradiction.”

Warning against treating every poetic voice as the poet's personal belief · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Poetry
• Truth

“The work is not fruitful of pleasure, of honour, or of profit; but, like other such tasks, it may be none the less useful and necessary.”

Recognising that necessary work need not bring pleasure or reward · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Art
• Truth

“Sincere or insincere, insolent or respectful, I let my assailants say out their say unheeded.”

Expressing indifference to hostile criticism · Notes on Poems and Reviews

• Fame
• Truth

“There are too many passages equally and diversely great and unsurpassable.”

Acknowledging that literary greatness can resist narrow ranking · Letter, 21 July 1887

• Art
• Poetry

“I am not a professional or official poet, and could not undertake to write any verse—patriotic or other—to order.”

Rejecting the idea of poetry as work manufactured on command · Letter, 1899

• Art
• Poetry

“Sublimity is the test of imagination as distinguished from invention or from fancy: and the first English poet whose powers can be called sublime was Christopher Marlowe.”

Treating sublimity as the defining test of poetic imagination · The Age of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe

• Art
• Beauty
• Poetry

“It is not, so to speak, the literal but the spiritual order which I have studied to observe and to indicate: the periods which I seek to define belong not to chronology but to art.”

Distinguishing artistic development from mere chronological sequence · A Study of Shakespeare

• Art
• Time

“As the technical work of a painter appeals to the eye, so the technical work of a poet appeals to the ear.”

Emphasising the ear as the instrument for judging poetic technique · A Study of Shakespeare

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“A workman can only be known by his work.”

Making the work itself the primary evidence for understanding its maker · A Study of Shakespeare

• Art
• Truth

“A painter should be studied in his pictures and a poet in his verse.”

Arguing that artists should be understood through their chosen medium · A Study of Shakespeare

• Art
• Poetry

“A singer must be tested by his song.”

Insisting that an artist should be judged through the work itself · A Study of Shakespeare

• Poetry
• Truth

“One question stands forth first and last; is the work done good work and great, or not?”

Reducing criticism to the fundamental question of artistic achievement · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art
• Truth

“Every master of pathos has a key of his own to unlock the source of tears, or of that passionate and piteous pleasure which lies above and under the region of tears.”

Suggesting that each great artist reaches emotion by a distinct path · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art
• Despair
• Joy

“A great poet can perfect his picture with strangely few touches.”

Praising economy and precision in poetic depiction · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art
• Poetry

“A man who writes of a nation or a time, however bad and base in the main, without any love for it, cannot write of it well.”

Arguing that truthful portrayal requires some degree of sympathetic love · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art
• Love
• Truth

“It pierces and shakes the very roots of passion.”

Describing art's power to reach the foundations of feeling · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art
• Love

“It is great because it deals greatly with great emotions.”

Linking artistic greatness to the treatment of powerful emotion · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

• Art