“This is like asking that a definition of gold should contain the name of the acid that detects its pureness.”

Showing why a definition cannot by itself certify artistic quality · Preface, Shadowy Thresholds (1919)

• Art
• Truth

“Art may depend on exasperation rather than inspiration to break its bonds, but exasperation is not inspiration.”

Distinguishing creative frustration from genuine inspiration · Preface, Shadowy Thresholds (1919)

• Art
• Poetry

“What is surprising is that so many fail to see that the measure of our artistic sincerity and intelligence is not determined by revolt alone, but by the things to which we revolt—and by what we are willing to destroy.”

Arguing that rebellion must be judged by what it rejects and destroys · Preface, Shadowy Thresholds (1919)

• Art
• Truth

“Only a selective liberalism offers both the repose and unrest necessary to permanently interesting creativeness.”

Arguing for a liberal middle course between artistic extremes · Preface, Shadowy Thresholds (1919)

• Art
• Poetry

“Art freedom and finality no more spring from excesses than from conservatism.”

Rejecting both artistic excess and rigid conservatism · Preface, Shadowy Thresholds (1919)

• Art
• Truth

“Perhaps no narrative poet can do better than to ask himself if this be true.”

Urging narrative poets to test their craft against modern storytelling technique · Preface, Wraiths and Realities (1918)

• Art
• Poetry

“Yet the romanticist would seem to have the better theoretical viewpoint.”

Arguing that romanticism offers the broadest theoretical position · Preface, Wraiths and Realities (1918)

• Art
• Poetry

“The realist, stressing truth to life and minimizing restraint as to method or material, finds himself blamed for mistaking the mere raw material of life for ultimate art, and so for praising the sordid or commonplace.”

Summarising realism's pursuit of truth to life and its artistic risk · Preface, Wraiths and Realities (1918)

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“The voicing of a preference for classicism, realism or romanticism is nearly always the conscious or unconscious preoccupation of critics of poetry.”

Identifying the competing critical ideals that shape judgements of poetry · Preface, Wraiths and Realities (1918)

• Art
• Poetry

“In truth the solution for us lies in a thorough absorption of all great art values, and in a maturer and less restless living of our poetic life generally.”

Advocating mature engagement with the enduring values of art · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“We must have a truer and greater freedom than can be given by any change of verse form.”

Calling for artistic freedom deeper than formal experimentation · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“Neither this excessive realism nor the exploitation of it will suffice to relieve our situation.”

Arguing that neither realism nor its promotion solves poetry's deeper problems · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“But in the hands of these realists they become strangely self-conscious and artificial.”

Warning that deliberate naturalness can itself become artificial · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“No poetic public will long give attention to a realism which makes the mistake, common to all shallow realism, of neglecting passion, imagination, charm and nearly all the permanent qualities of any true poetry.”

Defending passion, imagination and charm as enduring poetic qualities · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Beauty
• Poetry

“To the experienced these new "isms" are but aspects of a general and unrestrained reaction toward realism.”

Seeing fashionable schools as part of a broader realist reaction · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“Never has poetry tried so hard to be prose as at the present time in America.”

Rejecting the collapse of poetic form into ordinary prose · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“I cannot help sometimes feeling as if it were my true task to enlarge the sphere of Sacred Poetry, and extend its influence.”

Stating the religious and literary vocation she increasingly felt in later life · Late letter on Scenes and Hymns of Life, c. 1834

• Art
• Faith
• Poetry

“I have now passed through the feverish and somewhat visionary state of mind often connected with the passionate study of art in early life.”

Looking back on youthful artistic intensity from a more settled stage of life · Late letter on art and faith, c. 1834

• Art
• Time

“Some passages seem to give me back my own thoughts and feelings, my whole inner being, with a mirror, more true than ever friend could hold up.”

Describing the startling experience of recognising oneself in another writer's work · Letter fragment on Corinne

• Art
• Friendship
• Truth

“Most of them were written before I consider my mind and feelings quite to have awakened — had they slept on, perhaps it would have been happier for me.”

Looking back on artistic awakening as a source of both insight and pain · Letter fragment on her early writings

• Art
• Despair
• Poetry

“The more I can throw my mind into any undertaking which interests my friends, the more I make to myself a place of refuge from personal suffering.”

Finding relief from private sorrow through purposeful work for friends · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Art
• Friendship
• Hope

“It is their perpetual bitterness, and jealousy, and strife, from which I turn with so much dislike.”

Rejecting the hostility and rivalry she encountered in literary reviewing · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Art
• Fame
• Truth

“It is, in my opinion, full of beauty, and of truth, developing itself clearly and sorrowfully, like almost all truth, I believe, through the colouring mists of imagination.”

Linking artistic imagination with the gradual revelation of difficult truths · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“I do not think I can bear the burden of my life without music, for more than two or three days.”

Showing how essential music was to her emotional life · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Art
• Music