Quotations

“Important, therefore, as may be the office of the imagination in poetry, the great spring of poetry is emotion.”

Placing emotion at the source of poetic creation · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

“The language of passion is naturally figurative, but its figures are only employed to heighten the intensity of the expression.”

Linking figurative language to the natural expression of strong feeling · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

William Cullen Bryant

“The feelings and the imagination, when skilfully touched, act reciprocally on each other.”

Showing how emotion and imagination strengthen one another · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

William Cullen Bryant

“The truth is, that poetry which does not find its way to the heart is scarcely deserving of the name.”

Arguing that genuine poetry must reach the emotions · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

William Cullen Bryant

“The most beautiful poetry is that which takes the strongest hold of the feelings, and, if it is really the most beautiful, then it is poetry in the highest sense.”

Making emotional power central to poetic beauty · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

William Cullen Bryant

“The senses and the heart, if they are not exercised, atrophy and languish.”

Original: Los sentidos y el corazón que no se ejercen, se atrofian y languidecen. — Arguing that feeling and perception must be exercised through life · Letter to Juan Ramón Jiménez, Autocrítica (Spanish)

Manuel Machado

“To say plainly what one thinks or feels about things is, for certain temperaments, a necessity.”

Original: Decir buenamente lo que se piensa o se siente de las cosas, es para ciertos temperamentos una necesidad. — Presenting expression as an inward necessity rather than a literary pose · Preface, La guerra literaria (Spanish)

Manuel Machado

“We are surpriz'd, the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection find the passion so just that we shou'd be surpriz'd if we had not wept.”

Describing the apparent naturalness of powerful dramatic emotion · Preface to Shakespeare, 1725

Alexander Pope

“The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections.”

Recognising why intellectual pursuits can lose out to more immediate pleasures · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

A.E.Housman

“I think that to transfuse emotion, not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer, is the peculiar function of poetry.”

Defining poetry as the transmission of felt experience between writer and reader · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

A.E.Housman

“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

A.E.Housman

“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

A.E.Housman

“Flowers are made to seduce the senses: fragrance, form, colour.”

Recognising beauty as a direct appeal to physical perception · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

Hilda Doolittle

“Should we be able to think with the womb and feel with the brain?”

Challenging conventional distinctions between intellect, emotion and the body · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

Hilda Doolittle

“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

Hilda Doolittle

“I was one day punished in school for crying and that punishment ever afterwards haunted the master like an evil dream, for I was only crying over Goldsmith's Deserted Village.”

Reveals the intensity of his emotional response to literature even as a child · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

Francis Ledwidge

“We cannot discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere.”

Arguing that genuine artistic subjects are discovered through emotional necessity rather than calculation · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

William Butler Yeats

“Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions, with all the uncounted flavours of old experience.”

Describing cultivated emotion as something deepened by memory and accumulated human experience · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

William Butler Yeats

“It is what is old and far off that stirs us the most deeply.”

Expressing Yeats's belief in the imaginative power of antiquity, legend and distance · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

William Butler Yeats

“The test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.”

Locating poetry's ultimate test in felt delight rather than intellectual argument · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

William Butler Yeats

“The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one’s own ruling passion.”

Arguing that great imaginative characters can become profound inner experiences · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

William Butler Yeats

“I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness.”

Describing authentic art as emerging from the need to release emotional burdens · Essay, The Tree of Life

William Butler Yeats

“Literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul.”

Defining literature through atmosphere and inward experience rather than explanation · Essay, The Autumn of the Body, in Ideas of Good and Evil

William Butler Yeats

“The poet is one who sees life newly, assimilates it emotionally, and contrives to utter it musically.”

Defining poetry as a union of fresh perception, emotion and musical expression · Essay, The Poet, or Seer

Robert Williams Buchanan

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Topic: Emotion