“If you visit the Front don’t forget to come up the line at night to watch the German rockets. They have white crests which throw a pale flame across no-man’s-land. It is like the end of a beautiful world.”

Finds haunting beauty within a landscape created by war · Letter to Edward Marsh, 1 July 1917

• Beauty
• Light
• War

“The mind can never do the same thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it passes to the strange and hidden.”

Describing the mind's restless movement from familiar beauty towards strangeness and mystery · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

• Beauty
• Mind
• Novelty

“The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself.”

Recognising the danger of pursuing beauty at the expense of authentic self-expression · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Art
• Beauty
• Identity

“Is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most difficult of the arts?”

Treating beauty and enduring love alike as achievements requiring sustained effort · Essay, The Looking-glass

• Art
• Beauty
• Love

“A wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass.”

Linking performance, self-awareness and disciplined cultivation of physical expression · Essay, The Looking-glass

• Art
• Beauty
• Discipline

“Beauty is an accusation.”

A compressed statement of beauty's unsettling power to challenge ordinary life · Essay, The Symbolism of Poetry

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth.”

Presenting artistic creation as a personal search for beauty and truth · Essay, Ireland and the Arts

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs.”

Linking profound artistic beauty with an equally profound experience of suffering · Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis

• Art
• Beauty
• Suffering

“Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world.”

Arguing that beauty in art must not depend upon evasion of painful reality · Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“Realism, properly so called, is truth, and truth is always beautiful.”

Linking genuine realism with artistic truth rather than mere literal detail · Essay, Society’s Looking-glass, 1862

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“Why, the very element of poetry is faith—faith in the beautiful, the divine, and the true.”

Describing poetry as rooted in belief in beauty and truth · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

• Beauty
• Faith
• Poetry

“I believe the love of flowers to be as inherent in the disposition as any other inclination.”

Seeing delight in flowers as a natural human instinct · Traits and Trials of Early Life

• Beauty
• Instinct
• Nature

“I could see the tree-boughs waving in the wind, and I could see the pageant of sunset in the west, and the glimmer of a fire upon the hearth.”

Recalling the fragments of visual beauty that remained to him before complete blindness · Reminiscence recorded by William Sharp, Papers Critical and Reminiscent

• Beauty
• Memory
• Nature

“Much as we all love and admire your work, it seems to me we have not yet fully realized the unostentatious loveliness of your lyrics, as fine for lyrics as your best sonnets are for sonnets.”

Praising lyric poetry whose artistry works without display or self-consciousness · Letter to Louise Chandler Moulton, quoted in Representative Women of New England

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Style

“The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were broken.”

Suggesting that some artistic effects depend precisely upon resisting complete explanation · Essay, Wishmakers' Town, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Art
• Beauty
• Wonder

“Daybreak at the seaside or up among the mountains is sometimes worth while, though familiarity with it breeds indifference.”

Suggesting that even natural beauty gains force from rarity rather than routine · Essay, On Early Rising, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Beauty
• Experience
• Nature

“I have read the ‘Paroshpathor’ several times again, and am never tired of it—it seems to have soul-echoes of endless and haunting beauty.”

Capturing his responsiveness to the lingering emotional power of another writer's work · Letter to Rabindranath Tagore, 17 October 1898

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Reading

“These old spoil tips are the most poetic hills in the country. The finest poets, musicians and singers of our nation have consecrated them in the depths of the earth.”

Original: Yr hen dips' yma yw y bryniau mwyaf barddonol yn y wlad! Y mae beirdd a cherddorion a chantorion goreu ein cenedl ni wedi bod yn cysegru'r rhai hyn yn nyfnderoedd y ddaear. — Finding poetry and music within the industrial landscape of the coalfields · Address, National Eisteddfod Merthyr proclamation, 1900 (Welsh)

• Beauty
• Music
• Poetry

“Gray's perfect combination of sentiment and form may justly place him on the pedestal he occupies.”

Praising the marriage of emotional feeling and formal control · Speech, Gray Memorial unveiling, Cambridge, 26 May 1885

• Art
• Beauty
• Poetry

“What insures a lengthened existence to these pages is the combination of an almost peasant-village simplicity, with an abundant English and classical culture which seems to me without parallel in literature.”

Valuing the union of simplicity and cultivated learning · Memorial essay, Henry Bright

• Art
• Beauty

“Poetry so full of beauty and feeling, that the study of it is at once an inspiration and a despair to the artist.”

Capturing the mixture of inspiration and humility produced by great craftsmanship · Preface, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

• Art
• Beauty
• Poetry

“The criticism of art should be first, foremost, and all the time, aesthetic.”

Giving artistic value priority in literary criticism · Preface, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry

• Art
• Beauty

“Posterity cares nothing for the views which urged a man to write; to it, the poetry, its beauty as a work of art, is the only thing which matters.”

Arguing that time ultimately judges poetry by artistic achievement · Preface, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Time

“We should read poetry because only in that way can we know man in all his moods—in the most beautiful thoughts of his heart, in his farthest reaches of imagination.”

Presenting poetry as a means of understanding the full range of human experience · Essay, Why We Should Read Poetry

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Truth