“First, the right words: secondly, those words in the right order: thirdly, the agreeable sound of them in sequence.”

Reducing poetic style to three practical disciplines of wording, order and sound · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“Poetry has a field of its own, which is repudiated by Science as well as by Common-sense.”

Claiming a distinct domain for poetic knowledge and imagination · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Poetry
• Truth

“It is really a matter for wonder how rational intercourse through the medium of language can be so complete and easy as it is, when the ideas conveyed by the words are so different in each person.”

Observing the remarkable success of language despite differences in individual meaning · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Poetry
• Truth

“Complete knowledge of any one thing would include its relations to everything else, which is more knowledge than any man may possess.”

Reflecting on the ultimately inexhaustible nature of knowledge · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Truth

“All Art, we said, was the expression of Ideas in a sensuous medium. Now Words, the medium of Poetry, actually are Ideas.”

Explaining why language gives poetry a uniquely intellectual medium · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“The medium of Painting is colours; the medium of Music is sound; and the medium of Poetry is words.”

A concise comparison of the materials used by three arts · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“Poetry is an Art — that is, it is one of the Fine Arts — and, using the word in this recognized sense, all Art is the expression of Ideas in some sensuous material or medium.”

Defining art as ideas embodied in forms that can affect the senses · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Poetry

“The grammar of any art is dry and unintelligible to the layman: it seems unrelated to the magic of its delight.”

Contrasting technical rules with the lived pleasure of art · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Beauty

“Let me explain why an artist is unwilling to discourse on his own art. The fact is that in every art it is only the formal side which can be formulated.”

Explaining why artists may resist reducing their creative work to theory · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Poetry

“In all fields of Art the imitators are far more numerous than the artists, and they will copy the externals.”

Warning that imitation tends to reproduce surfaces rather than creative substance · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Art
• Poetry

“Good Keeping is a first essential in all good writing, and especially in poetry.”

Making artistic consistency a fundamental requirement of effective writing · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Art
• Poetry

“It is difficult to dissociate the quality of Diction from two other matters, namely, Properties and Keeping.”

Emphasising that poetic language depends on wider artistic coherence · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Art
• Poetry

“This is poetic magic. Certainly it was not to common-sense that Milton turned for consolation; and a work of sheer beauty was the only worthy offering that Poetry could make.”

Defending poetry's power to answer grief through beauty rather than logic · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Beauty
• Death
• Poetry

“We have to face the fact that this strange and meaningless invocation does not sound frigid or foolish in the poem.”

Showing how poetic context can transform what common sense might reject · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Art
• Poetry

“Both movements alike protest against all archaisms of vocabulary and grammar and what are called literary forms, and plead for the simple terms and direct forms of common speech.”

Summarising the case for direct, contemporary language in poetry · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Poetry
• Truth

“The revolt against the old diction is a reaction which in its general attitude is rational.”

Acknowledging the legitimacy of resistance to inherited poetic conventions · Essay, Poetic Diction, 1923

• Art
• Poetry

“The purpose of education is to draw out or educate this inborn love of Beauty.”

Linking education with the cultivation of an innate response to beauty · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Beauty
• Childhood

“Every man is born with a desire of Beauty or of Good in some degree and in some kind, and he instinctively feeds that desire or liking on what is agreeable to it.”

Describing an innate human impulse towards beauty and goodness · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Beauty
• Truth

“Art and Morals were not invented by Reason.”

Arguing that aesthetic and moral impulses arise more deeply than conscious reasoning · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Art
• Truth

“This dim middle place is the magazine of our common sense; it is the garden where our ideals grow, and its spontaneous fruiting is genius.”

Imagining the unconscious mind as the soil from which ideals and genius emerge · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“A man holds, hidden away from his memory, a vaster wealth of knowledge than he is aware of, or can draw on at pleasure.”

Reflecting on the depth of knowledge stored beyond conscious recall · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Memory
• Truth

“Temper and sharpen it as you may, your chisel cannot cut itself. We should therefore not expect too much.”

Using a vivid metaphor for the limitations of human reason · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Truth

“Reason is the only tool that we have to work with, and that a tool cannot work on itself.”

Pointing to the limits of reason when it tries to examine itself · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Truth

“To educate means to draw out, and if we are to seek to draw out the human mind we must first have some clear notion as to what the mind is like.”

Presenting education as the development of capacities already within us · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Childhood
• Truth