“From his very beginning in this country the Negro has been, without the formal recognition of literature and art, creative.”

Affirming a creative tradition that existed long before receiving institutional recognition · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

• Art
• Creativity
• History

“Only gradually through the dull purgatory of the Age of Discussion, has Negro life eventually issued forth to an Age of Expression.”

Describing the movement from being discussed by others towards creative self-expression · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

• Freedom
• Identity
• Literature

“The sense that one gets in all that has been written about Emily Dickinson during the year is, not that she is a smaller star in the literary heavens than Whitman, but of a greater distance from the eye.”

Suggesting that neglected genius may be distant from recognition rather than lesser in stature · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1924

• Criticism
• Fame
• Poetry

“No one can deny that here indeed was the key for large imaginings and energies which were capable of intensifying vision on a new plane of human experience.”

Celebrating poetry's capacity to enlarge imaginative and human experience · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1924

• Experience
• Imagination
• Poetry

“The currents of song came from every source from which the national character was forming; all, more or less, striving to present a unified consciousness of native art.”

Presenting poetry as an expression of many cultural currents within a nation · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1924

• Culture
• Identity
• Poetry

“These new talents were new roots in a soil not too richly fertilized by the chemistry of original song.”

Using organic imagery to describe the emergence of new American poets · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1924

• Growth
• Originality
• Poetry

“There is an influence more mystical than the average critic gives credit for being which is reshaping the foundation of our poetic ideals and visions.”

Recognising cultural forces in poetry that resist straightforward critical explanation · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

• Criticism
• Mystery
• Poetry

“I come to no conclusion as to what is to-day, or what may be to-morrow, American poetry.”

Accepting that literary traditions remain unsettled and continually evolving · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

• Change
• Humility
• Poetry

“It is the superficial belief of some critics that American poetry has its ideal and embodiment in Walt Whitman.”

Warning against reducing a national poetic tradition to a single representative figure · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

• Criticism
• Poetry
• Tradition

“It is not intellect that has brought this about; less has it been due to education; it has been due to character and character is the expression of habits and ideas.”

Emphasising the formative power of inherited habits and shared ideas · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

• Character
• Culture
• Education

“I suppose that any art may be considered American which conforms in expression to the ideals of the American people.”

Considering the relationship between artistic expression and national ideals · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

• Art
• Culture
• Identity

“What makes an American poetry is a question that has never been and can never be solved by criticism.”

Questioning whether national literary identity can ever be neatly defined · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

• Criticism
• Identity
• Poetry

“The poets are doing satisfying and vitally excellent work, and it only remains for the American public to do its duty by showing a substantial appreciation.”

Calling upon the reading public to recognise and support contemporary poets · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913

• Community
• Poetry
• Reading

“Our poetry needs, more than anything else, encouragement and support, to reveal its qualities.”

Arguing that poetry flourishes when readers actively value and sustain it · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913

• Community
• Poetry
• Support

“Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only.”

Celebrating art as an embodied encounter with the sensory world rather than pure abstraction · Essay, The Thinking of the Body

• Art
• Experience
• Mind

“But it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses.”

Giving instinct the decisive role in an artist's choice of subject · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

• Art
• Instinct
• Mind

“We must not ask is the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our own interest, and we can understand no other.”

Rejecting audience calculation in favour of genuine personal engagement with a subject · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

• Art
• Independence
• Sincerity

“We cannot discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere.”

Arguing that genuine artistic subjects are discovered through emotional necessity rather than calculation · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

• Art
• Emotion
• Instinct

“The mind can never do the same thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it passes to the strange and hidden.”

Describing the mind's restless movement from familiar beauty towards strangeness and mystery · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

• Beauty
• Mind
• Novelty

“If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again.”

Contrasting the saint's search for stillness with the artist's fascination with recurring life · Essay, In the Serpent’s Mouth

• Art
• Eternity
• Poetry

“The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the presence before an ever changing mind of what is permanent in the world.”

Defining artistic fulfilment as an encounter between changing consciousness and enduring reality · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Art
• Eternity
• Mind

“The artist stands between the saint and the world of impermanent things.”

Placing the artist between spiritual permanence and the transient world of experience · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Art
• Faith
• Time

“The imaginative writer differs from the saint in that he identifies himself—to the neglect of his own soul, alas!—with the soul of the world.”

Contrasting the artist's immersion in worldly experience with the saint's pursuit of transcendence · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Art
• Faith
• Writing

“No mind is more valuable than the images it contains.”

Affirming the central importance of a mind's store of emotionally resonant images · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Imagery
• Imagination
• Mind