“Don't keep reminding me I'm a poet. I very seldom feel equal to living up to my own Immortal Verse.”

Ironic self-deflation of the public poet-persona she felt she could not inhabit · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Humility
• Poets
• Writing

“I know Keats far better through his letters than by even the ablest and most intimate memoirs.”

Letters as the nearest approach to a living voice · Quoted by Elizabeth Sharp as his own words

• Letters
• Poets
• Understanding

“Give the name of poet to him who can make such a work, and not to the versifier, composer of epigrams, sonnets, satires, elegies and other such small scraps, where artifice cannot stretch far.”

Original: Donne-luy nom de poëte, et non au versificateur, composeur d'epigrammes, sonnets, satyres, elegies, et autres tels menus fatras, où l'artifice ne se peut estendre. — A sharp line drawn between the true poet and the mere maker of verses · Preface on the heroic poem, La Franciade (French)

• Craft
• Poetry
• Poets

“The poet who does not truly sing himself is like Eutychus, the painter in the epigram, who begat twenty sons and never got a single likeness, even among his children.”

Impersonal verse dismissed as a family without faces · Essay, The Personal Note

• Individuality
• Poetry
• Poets

“It's not manufactured. He was rather like a cup under a sparkling fountain.”

Poetry treated as reception rather than manufacture · Conversation on Walter de la Mare, reported in Time magazine, 1958

• Inspiration
• Poetry
• Poets

“It is hardly necessary to state that Yorkshire has produced neither a Robert Burns, a William Barnes, nor even an Edwin Waugh.”

Honest about the absence of a single commanding dialect genius · Introduction, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

• Comparison
• Honesty
• Poets

“The poet must stand alone.”

Sees isolation as the price of the calling · Preface, Complete Poetical Works

• Independence
• Poets
• Solitude

“The poet is, must be, as sensitive as a child, and his work wears and wears till his nerves are so threadbare that he dares not take up a newspaper lest he may see something ugly.”

Describes the cost of a temperament that cannot look away · Preface, Complete Poetical Works

• Poets
• Sensitivity
• Suffering

“Well, let us go and talk with the poets.”

Greets a new city by looking first for fellow makers of verse · First words on arriving in San Francisco, 1870

• Beginning
• Conversation
• Poets

“There never was a poet and there never will be a poet who disputed God, or so degraded himself as to doubt his eternal existence.”

Treats belief in God as inseparable from the poetic vocation · Advice to a young writer

• Faith
• Poets
• Religion

“To me every man or woman who loves the beautiful is a poet. The gift of expression is a separate affair altogether.”

Widens poetry to include silent love of beauty · Conversation at a Rossetti dinner, later recalled in print

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Poets

“It was Horace who made a poet and scholar of me.”

She credited Horace Wylie with the reading and discipline that formed her craft · Recalled remark, about six years after leaving Washington

• Influence
• Learning
• Poets

“Yes, it would be a pity that a first-rate poet should be turned into a second-rate poet by marrying a third-rate poet.”

A dry verdict on her match with William Rose Benét, delivered with what Wilson called her harsh laugh · Conversation, reported by Edmund Wilson

• Marriage
• Poets
• Wit

“Perhaps I'm not (metrically speaking at any rate) a poet.”

Self-doubt after reviewers said his verse would have been better as prose · Letter to Maurice Browne, after criticism of Cophetua

• Criticism
• Doubt
• Poets

“To follow on Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne is perhaps a more difficult task than the poets of any age had to face.”

Names the Victorian shadow under which his generation wrote · Letter, May 1908

• Difficulty
• Poets
• Tradition

“Sincerity, as a primal quality, holds, in general, a lower place than might be expected among the essential characteristics that form the standard of the average group.”

Notes how schools prize manner over candour · Book, Some Contemporary Poets, 1920

• Convention
• Poets
• Sincerity

“The group is a support to individuals not strong enough to stand alone. It is at the same time a useful school for young poets.”

Sees coteries as both crutch and apprenticeship · Book, Some Contemporary Poets, 1920

• Community
• Learning
• Poets

“The modern poet's equipment must include, apart from the natural adoration of beauty, a clear and sound grasp upon facts, and a stupendous aptitude for assimilation.”

Beauty alone is not enough; the poet must digest the actual world · Essay, The Future of Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1912

• Beauty
• Knowledge
• Poets