“The Chinese poet seldom lets any portion of what he is saying unbalance the entirety.”

Praising formal and emotional balance within Chinese poetry · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

• Art
• Poetry

“The cynics are wrong who see in our future no place for an art which belongs, they say, to the childhood of the race.”

Defending poetry against predictions that modernity would make it obsolete · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

• Hope
• Poetry
• Time

“The head of a man and the heart of a child working together as in the Chinese have made possible with one race and may make possible with any race, even in the thick of the most intricate culture, the continuance of the purest poetry.”

Arguing that maturity of mind and openness of feeling can preserve poetry within complex cultures · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

• Childhood
• Hope
• Poetry