“It is what is old and far off that stirs us the most deeply.”

Expressing Yeats's belief in the imaginative power of antiquity, legend and distance · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Emotion
• Imagination
• Tradition

“I think, too, that no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end.”

Suggesting that serious art seeks something deeper than simple pleasure · Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis

• Art
• Life
• Poetry

“There is no fine literature without nationality, no fine nationality without literature.”

linking artistic achievement to a living cultural inheritance · Essay, Poetry and Tradition, 1907

• Art
• Poetry