“Poetry is the child of nature, which, regulated and made beautiful by art, presenteth the most harmonious of all other compositions; among which (if we rightly consider) the dramatical is the most absolute.”

Elevating drama as the highest form of poetry when nature is ordered by art · Preface to the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (1647)

• Art
• Drama
• Poetry

“That Poesy should be as pervial as oratory, and plainness her special ornament, were the plain way to barbarism.”

Defending density and difficulty in poetry against simple clarity · Preface to Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

• Art
• Clarity
• Poetry

“Haikai values the use of common language yet departing from the common. To depart from the common while still using the common: the method of departure from the common is most difficult.”

Original: 俳諧は俗語を用ひて俗を離るるを尚ぶ。俗を離れて俗を用ゆ。離俗の法最もかたし。 — Buson’s core principle of rizoku captures the paradox of elevating everyday speech into refined art without abandoning the ordinary. · Preface to Shōha’s Haiku Collection (Shundei kushū), 1777 (Japanese)

• Art
• Language
• Poetry

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.”

Placing the soul’s mediation at the centre of artistic creation · Marginalia

• Art
• Nature
• Soul

“Genius ‘cometh from afar,’ and its ‘trailing clouds of glory’ are not for us to grasp while we are in the prison-house of the commonplace.”

Expressing the unbridgeable distance between ordinary life and true genius · Essay, A Literary Whim (Appleton’s Journal, 1871)

• Art
• Genius
• Reality

“Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”

Arguing that perception is shaped by art · Essay, The Decay of Lying

• Art
• Perception
• Reality

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”

Claiming that accurate vision destroys art · Essay, The Decay of Lying

• Art
• Perception
• Reality

“The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”

Defining art as the creation of beautiful falsehoods · Essay, The Decay of Lying

• Art
• Beauty
• Lying

“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.”

Insisting that morality has no place in artistic method · Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Art
• Ethics
• Style

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”

Identifying art as the highest expression of personal uniqueness · Essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism

• Art
• Expression
• Individuality

“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”

Distinguishing the art of living from literary achievement · Conversation with André Gide

• Art
• Genius
• Life

“All art is at once surface and symbol.”

Emphasising the dual aesthetic and symbolic nature of art · Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Art
• Beauty
• Symbolism

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”

Defining the essential role of the artist · Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Art
• Beauty
• Creation

“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Insisting on aesthetic standards over moral ones · Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Art
• Books
• Criticism

“The text of an opera, the words of a song, the program of a symphony or tone poem, or whatever name in the future may be given to any musical composition is of no importance or significance whatsoever.”

Insisting that music speaks adequately on its own without literary crutches · Book, Berlioz: The Man and His Work (1934)

• Art
• Expression
• Music

“I can confidently and in soberness declare that Wagner is a colossal fraud.”

A characteristically outspoken dismissal of a towering figure by an independent critic · Music criticism, on the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner's death

• Art
• Criticism
• Music

“No work of art has real import, none endures, unless the maker has something to say.”

Expression without a thought worth uttering does not last · Lecture, The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892)

• Art
• Expression
• Meaning

“Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting.”

A caution against mistaking the taste of the hour for enduring work · Essay, Poets of America (1885)

• Art
• Judgement
• Taste

“Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.”

On why verse looks easy and is unforgiving of the half-gifted · Essay, Victorian Poets (1875)

• Art
• Excellence
• Poetry

“Romantic things are good in Art and Poetry, but a Woman's heart is worth them all.”

Setting living affection above the romance of books · Letter to Elizabeth Kahle, 1879

• Art
• Heart
• Love

“For some years I've been striving to ferret out the one evident lack of our whole art guild; and I've struck it: It's business. We naturally hate that, and therefore avoid it. That's why we're all victims.”

On artists undone by their dislike of the practical side of the trade · Letter to Rudyard Kipling, 1893

• Art
• Artists
• Commerce

“I don't believe in pure form. I don't believe in pure anything.”

An early rejection of abstraction that later shaped his plea for impure poetry · Letter, 25 September 1926

• Art
• Belief
• Form

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

Distinguishes easy emotion from feeling that has held · Adagia, notebook aphorisms

• Art
• Emotion
• Feeling

“Art itself is nothing more than a reaction to as well as a record of the things one loves or hates, and criticism is merely an annotated explanation of these likes and dislikes.”

Admitting that taste, not impersonality, drives both making and judging · Preface, American Poetry Since 1900

• Art
• Criticism
• Taste