“I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.”

Suggesting that poetry may be recognised instinctively without being definable · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

• Humour
• Instinct
• Poetry

“Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual.”

Describing poetry as something experienced bodily as well as mentally · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

• Body
• Emotion
• Poetry

“Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.”

Expressing Housman's deliberately anti-intellectual conception of poetry · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

• Emotion
• Mind
• Poetry

“Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it; not the sentiment but the words in which the idea is clothed.”

Locating poetry primarily in expression rather than subject matter · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

• Language
• Poetry
• Style

“She is indeed rocks set in a blue sea, she is the sea itself, breaking and tortured and torturing, but never broken.”

Evoking Sappho as an enduring artistic presence shaped by suffering yet resistant to destruction · Essay, The Wise Sappho

• Poetry
• Strength
• Suffering

“She is the island of artistic perfection where the lover of ancient beauty may yet find foothold.”

Presenting Sappho as a sustaining refuge and model for later artists · Essay, The Wise Sappho

• Beauty
• Influence
• Poetry

“No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano.”

Describing creativity surviving around the remains of profound emotional upheaval · Memoir, End to Torment

• Creativity
• Memory
• Poetry

“I had never heard of vers libre until I was discovered by Ezra Pound.”

Recalling that her early poetic experiments preceded her knowledge of formal literary labels · Autobiographical recollection

• Influence
• Originality
• Poetry

“Sappho has become for us a name, an abstraction as well as a pseudonym for poignant human feeling.”

Reflecting on how a poet can become an enduring embodiment of human emotion · Essay, The Wise Sappho

• Emotion
• Influence
• Poetry

“Georgian Poetry, with my three excluded, contains, I think, the best poems of the century.”

Offers both generous praise of his contemporaries and a modest aside about himself · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Humility
• Poetry

“Shelley was innocent of such sins and poor Keats never heard of them.”

His criticism gives way to warm admiration for Shelley and Keats · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Influence
• Poetry

“I began to pick faults with Longfellow and Tennyson.”

Marks the transition from youthful admiration to independent critical judgement · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Growth
• Poetry

“But the poems of Keats and his sad life appealed to me most.”

Identifies Keats as the poet whose work and fate affected him most deeply · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Sorrow

“I longed to see the Italy of Shelley and the Greece of Byron.”

Literary admiration transformed distant countries into places of imaginative pilgrimage · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Travel

“I turned especially to the Elizabethans and the ballads that came before the great Renaissance.”

Identifies traditions that particularly attracted him as a developing poet · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Tradition

“I read and studied the poets of England from the age of Chaucer to Swinburne.”

Describes the breadth of his self-directed literary education · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Learning
• Poetry
• Reading

“I wrote wander songs for the cuckoos and winter songs for the robin.”

A concise description of how closely his early writing followed the natural world · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Creativity
• Nature
• Poetry

“Indeed I left many an exercise unfinished hurrying over some thought that shaped itself into rhyme.”

Poetic impulses repeatedly displaced ordinary schoolwork · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Creativity
• Education
• Poetry

“I thought nothing in the world as wonderful as Shakespeare's fairy song.”

Captures his youthful delight in Shakespeare and imaginative poetry · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Imagination
• Poetry
• Wonder

“I loved the series of metaphors in Hiawatha.”

Shows an early fascination with figurative language · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Metaphor
• Poetry

“I could recite passages from The Golden Legend at eight years.”

Evidence of an unusually early appetite and memory for poetry · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Childhood
• Memory
• Poetry

“My admiration for Longfellow began early.”

Identifies one of the important literary enthusiasms of his childhood · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Reading

“Years afterwards he often spoke to me of that verse and wished he had the slate to present to some one who liked the story and my poetry.”

Shows how an apparently trivial childhood verse became part of his personal legend · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Childhood
• Memory
• Poetry

“The silly verse accomplished its end.”

A dry assessment of his first successful exercise in practical poetry · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Childhood
• Humour
• Poetry