“Poetry is a compound of thought and feeling.”

Describing poetry as a union of intellect and emotion · Lecture, later published as the essay The Name and Nature of Poetry

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.”

Emphasising that poetic expression matters as much as the idea expressed · Lecture, later published as the essay The Name and Nature of Poetry

• Art
• Poetry

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”

Finding creative possibility in spontaneity and disorder · Autobiographical prose, commonly attributed

• Art
• Joy

“The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.”

Celebrating fiction as a form capable of holding the complexity of human life together · Essay on the novel

• Art
• Truth

“The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his surroundings.”

Defining art as a living connection between human beings and the world · Essay on art

• Art
• Nature

“The human soul needs actual beauty more than it needs bread.”

Asserting beauty as a fundamental human necessity rather than a luxury · Essay

• Art
• Beauty

“Poetry of this sort is not a window through which one may see, but a picture hung on the wall.”

Distinguishing decorative poetry from poetry that interprets human experience · Essay, American Richness and English Distinction, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“For magic is itself a changing thing. The sparrow of today is the phoenix of tomorrow, and vice versa.”

Reflecting on how literary taste continually transforms the ordinary and the marvellous · Essay, The Mortality of Magic, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Change
• Time

“They appear to remember that, after all, literature should be drawn from life, not from literature.”

Valuing direct experience over imitation of inherited literary conventions · Essay, Confectionery and Caviar, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Experience
• Truth

“The conception of what it is that constitutes the lyric scope has, if anything, petrified.”

Criticising the narrow conventions that had come to limit lyric poetry · Essay, Narrative Poetry and the Vestigial Lyric, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Convention
• Poetry

“It is not verbal merely, nor rhythmic; for it remains in translation. It springs from the ideas themselves.”

Locating literary power in the relationships between ideas rather than sound alone · Essay, New Curiosity Shop and Jean de Bosschère, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“The fact is that in such cases the temperament comes first, the theory afterwards.”

Suggesting that artistic theories often rationalise instincts already present in the artist · Essay, Poetic Realism: Carl Sandburg, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Instinct
• Truth

“It is more striking to play a tune on the Chinese p'i-pa than on the banjo.”

Observing how rarity and unfamiliarity can be used to create an impression of distinction · Essay, A Pointless Pointillist: Ezra Pound, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Music
• Novelty

“Fortunately, aesthetic judgment is not entirely solipsistic, but is in part guided by certain aesthetic laws, vague but none the less usable.”

Maintaining that artistic judgement is personal but not wholly arbitrary · Essay, The Technique of Polyphonic Prose: Amy Lowell, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“It is in a kind of redundancy, on the psychic plane, that an artist's character is most manifest.”

Suggesting that an artist is revealed most clearly by recurring inner excesses · Essay, Possessor and Possessed: John Gould Fletcher, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Identity

“The literary abbozzo—or, to be more precise, the poetic abbozzo—demands a high degree of skill, a very sure instinct.”

Arguing that deliberate incompleteness requires discipline rather than carelessness · Essay, The Literary Abbozzo: Lola Ridge, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Poetry
• Skill

“If prose could convey subtler emotional moods and impressions than poetry, why write poetry?”

Defending poetry as a uniquely subtle instrument of emotional expression · Essay, The Function of Rhythm: Ford Madox Hueffer, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“Our enjoyment of art is consequent upon the satisfaction of two kinds of hunger: hunger for beauty and hunger for knowledge.”

Identifying beauty and understanding as complementary needs answered by art · Essay, The Two Magics: Edgar Lee Masters, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“But none the less, if we are to help poetry at all in this wilderness, we cannot rest content with amusement.”

Calling for serious critical engagement rather than detached entertainment · Essay, Poetry in America, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“If poetry were only an emotional discharge, it would be very much less complex than it is.”

Rejecting the idea that poetry is simply an unfiltered release of feeling · Essay, The Mechanism of Poetic Inspiration, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Emotion
• Poetry

“They represent my own particular attempt to urge the poetic currents of the day in a direction that might be favourable to me.”

Frankly acknowledging the personal interests that can shape literary criticism · Essay, Apologia Pro Specie Sua, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Criticism
• Poetry

“The poet was and is the one who invents language. Which is tantamount to inventing experience, or awareness.”

Presenting poetic language as a means of enlarging human perception · Letter to John Gould Fletcher

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“I argued that each of us was trying to urge poetry in a direction favorable to himself, and that dispassionate judgment was a chimera.”

Acknowledging that literary criticism is inevitably shaped by personal artistic interests · Essay in The Atlantic (1964), recalling an earlier critical preface

• Art
• Criticism
• Poetry

“The theme will almost invariably, left to itself, call the tune. The poet is only the medium.”

Suggesting that a poem's subject naturally determines its most fitting form · Essay in The Atlantic (1964)

• Art
• Music
• Poetry