“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

“The novel is the book of life.”

Presenting the novel as a form broad enough to contain human experience · Essay

• Art
• Truth

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

A defence of the independent truth that art can reveal · Essay

• Art
• Truth

“A poem should be as well-written as a piece of prose, and as well-constructed as a piece of architecture.”

Emphasising craft, structure and precision in poetry · Essay or lecture, as commonly attributed

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”

Framing verse as a release valve for turbulent feeling · Journal (Ravenna Journal, 1821)

• Art
• Despair
• Poetry