Quotations

“I have begun to accept my limitations and will not pay you the sorry compliment of returning verses for your poem.”

Combining literary self-criticism with an elegant compliment to a fellow writer · Letter to Charles Sayle, November 1889

Ernest Dowson

“I have a sonnet in this month's Temple Bar: that is all and that is nothing for I have never done any more than play with verse.”

Revealing how lightly Dowson professed to regard the art that later made him famous · Letter to Charles Sayle, 1 April 1889

Ernest Dowson

“I don't pretend to write verse seriously.”

A strikingly modest assessment from a writer whose reputation would rest chiefly on poetry · Letter to Arthur Moore, January 1889

Ernest Dowson

“I am a newspaperman who writes verse.”

A modest description of his vocation that deliberately resists the grander title of poet · Statement quoted in Time, 1959

Edgar A. Guest

“I call my verses only semi-poetry, and my realities, subject to the laws of ordinary mortal life, I dare call nothing more than possibility.”

Original: Yo no llamo a mis versos sino semi-poesía, y a mis realidades, que obedecen a la ley de vida de los simples mortales, no oso llamar otra cosa que posibilidad. — Characterising his work with modesty and an awareness of human limitation · Academy address, Semi-poesía y posibilidad, 1938 (Spanish)

Manuel Machado

“All right, but that is not Poetry with a big P, and that is the only kind that should be published. And there is mighty little of it.”

Expresses Macy's unusually severe standards for his own poetry and for publication · Conversation, recalled by William Alfred Hovey in Introduction to Poems (1905)

Arthur Macy

“Not to be a textual critic is no reproach to anyone, unless he pretends to be what he is not.”

Valuing intellectual honesty above pretensions to expertise · Lecture, The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, 1921

A.E.Housman

“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

Francis Ledwidge

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Presenting writing as a lifelong process of learning rather than a skill finally mastered · New York Journal-American, 11 July 1961

Ernest Hemingway

“I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon.”

Acknowledging another writer's achievement in an area he felt unable to improve upon · Letter, 3 July 1956

Ernest Hemingway

“I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Responding to his Nobel Prize by publicly praising another writer he admired · Statement, The New York Times Book Review, 7 November 1954

Ernest Hemingway

“It's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is.”

Explaining the awkwardness writers face when judging or discussing their own work · Letter to Malcolm Cowley, 17 October 1945

Ernest Hemingway

“I come to no conclusion as to what is to-day, or what may be to-morrow, American poetry.”

Accepting that literary traditions remain unsettled and continually evolving · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921

William Stanley Braithwaite

“I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment!”

Revealing the severe self-doubt that could follow the exhilaration of composition · Letter to Robert Browning, 20 March 1845

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“It was good for ‘distinguished people’ to be reminded occasionally of how very small consequence they really were, in the mighty life of the World!”

A humorous reminder that fame does not confer ultimate importance · Autobiographical essay, My First Book

Robert Williams Buchanan

“Set me down as a fool if you like, but never doubt the friendship which makes me subscribe myself, yours always.”

Putting personal loyalty above pride or reputation · Letter to George R. Sims

Robert Williams Buchanan

“This I have always aim'd at, and never could attain.”

A striking admission of artistic dissatisfaction immediately after describing his ideal of lyric concision · Letter to William Mason, 13 January 1758

Thomas Gray

“I shall be but a shrimp of an author.”

A characteristically self-deprecating assessment of his remarkably small body of published work · Letter to Horace Walpole, 25 February 1768

Thomas Gray

“Have I not grown old-fashioned by now, have I not lost my strength?”

Original: Да не устарел ли, не ослабел ли уж я? — Even an established master could wonder whether age had diminished his powers. · Question to Sergey Glinka, recalled in contemporaries’ memoirs (Russian)

Ivan Krylov

“I am like a sailor who has escaped disaster only because he has never ventured far out to sea.”

Original: Ведь я то же, что иной моряк, с которым оттого только и беды не случалось, что он не хаживал далеко в море. — At a celebration of his long career, Krylov answered praise with striking self-deprecation. · Conversation at his literary jubilee, recorded by P. A. Pletnev, 1838 (Russian)

Ivan Krylov