“Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to which almost every one that has written has added something.”

Presenting poetic language as a tradition continually enriched by individual writers · Letter to Richard West, 8 April 1742

• Language
• Poetry
• Tradition

“The language of the age is never the language of poetry.”

Expressing his belief that poetry requires a language distinct from ordinary contemporary speech · Letter to Richard West, 8 April 1742

• Language
• Poetry
• Style

“I shall be but a shrimp of an author.”

A characteristically self-deprecating assessment of his remarkably small body of published work · Letter to Horace Walpole, 25 February 1768

• Humility
• Humour
• Writing

“Have I not grown old-fashioned by now, have I not lost my strength?”

Original: Да не устарел ли, не ослабел ли уж я? — Even an established master could wonder whether age had diminished his powers. · Question to Sergey Glinka, recalled in contemporaries’ memoirs (Russian)

• Age
• Humility
• Writing

“Sergey Nikolayevich, there are not many of us old acquaintances left now.”

Original: Сергей Николаевич! нас, старых знакомых, теперь немного осталось. — A spare acknowledgement of age and the steadily thinning circle of old friends. · Conversation with Sergey Glinka, recalled in contemporaries’ memoirs (Russian)

• Age
• Friendship
• Mortality

“I am like a sailor who has escaped disaster only because he has never ventured far out to sea.”

Original: Ведь я то же, что иной моряк, с которым оттого только и беды не случалось, что он не хаживал далеко в море. — At a celebration of his long career, Krylov answered praise with striking self-deprecation. · Conversation at his literary jubilee, recorded by P. A. Pletnev, 1838 (Russian)

• Fame
• Humility
• Wit

“I've read it. I have neither the time nor the inclination to correct or revise it.”

Original: Прочел, ни поправлять, ни выправлять ни времени, ни охоты нет. — A characteristically dry refusal to spend time polishing someone else's account of his life. · Reply to M. E. Lobanov about a biography, recalled in contemporaries’ memoirs (Russian)

• Humour
• Privacy
• Writing

“Only those are worthy of love who carry within themselves the reason for being loved.”

Original: Ибо те одни достойны быть любимы, которые в себе самих заключают причину, побуждающую их любить. — Affection, in this view, should arise from qualities genuinely present in the person loved. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Character
• Love
• Wisdom

“Love is pictured with a blindfold; friendship removes it, looking carefully before it chooses.”

Original: Любовь пишется с завязанными глазами; но у дружества снимается сия завязка; дружество рассматривает прежде, нежели избирает. — A neat distinction between love's blindness and friendship's more deliberate judgement. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Friendship
• Love
• Wisdom

“Friendship, then, should rest on the strongest foundation: respect, strengthened by knowledge of another's worth, a foundation that cannot be shaken.”

Original: Итак, должно утверждать дружество на крепчайшем основании; почтение, подкрепляемое знанием достоинств; вот основание, которое никогда не может поколебаться. — He makes lasting friendship depend on informed respect rather than passing affection. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Character
• Friendship
• Respect

“In friendship, as in love, we should guard feeling and taste from growing dull; such caution is permissible.”

Original: В дружбе, как в любви, должно щадить чувства и вкус от притупления: сия предосторожность позволена. — Friendship, like love, needs care if familiarity is not to blunt feeling. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Care
• Friendship
• Love

“Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.”

Suggesting humorously that excessive conversation can dissipate the energy that might otherwise become writing · Remark quoted in Vogue, 15 March 1963

• Communication
• Humour
• Writing

“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

Presenting poetry as an intense and direct engagement with experience rather than an escape from it · Interview, The Art of Poetry No. 2, 1960

• Experience
• Life
• Poetry

“We're like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made the father such a man.”

Reflecting on the paradox that prosperity can remove the difficulties through which character was formed · Television interview, Meet the Press, 22 March 1959

• Character
• Society
• Struggle

“You've been broadened and enlarged to where you can listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

Defining education partly as the confidence and self-command required to hear challenging ideas · Commencement address, Dartmouth College, 1955

• Character
• Education
• Understanding

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”

Presenting composition as an act of exploration rather than the execution of a predetermined plan · Interview, New York Times, 7 November 1955

• Discovery
• Poetry
• Writing

“People will tell you that freedom lies in being cautious. Freedom lies in being bold.”

Linking genuine freedom with the courage to act rather than excessive caution · Television interview with Bela Kornitzer, 1952

• Character
• Courage
• Freedom

“For my part I should be as satisfied to play tennis with the net down as to write verse with no verse form set to stay me.”

Arguing that formal constraints give poetry resistance against which artistic skill can work · Letter to Lesley Frost, 1934

• Poetry
• Skill
• Style

“Poetry is a fresh look and a fresh listen.”

Reducing poetic perception to renewed attention to both the visible world and the sounds of life · Letter to John Freeman, 5 November 1925

• Language
• Poetry
• Wonder

“The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound.”

Describing the lasting mark a powerful poem can leave upon a receptive reader · Essay, The Poetry of Amy Lowell, 1925

• Emotion
• Poetry
• Reading

“There are a lot of good things I believe in, but for the life of me I can't always enumerate them at a moment's notice.”

A characteristically wry admission that deeply held convictions need not form a tidy creed · Letter to Alfred Harcourt, 1917

• Belief
• Humour
• Mind

“What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping.”

Presenting artistic creation as the imaginative rearrangement of materials already available to us · Letter to Sidney Cox, December 1914

• Art
• Imagination
• Writing

“The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”

Emphasising the importance of hearing rhythm, intonation and living speech in both writing and reading · Letter to John T. Bartlett, 22 February 1914

• Language
• Reading
• Writing

“Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.”

Defining poetry through metaphor, implication and meanings that extend beyond literal statement · Lecture, Education by Poetry, 1930

• Language
• Metaphor
• Poetry