“Of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar.”

Historians and scientists affirm and so can err; the poet invents without asserting · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Poetry
• Truth
• Writers

“The trend of modern poetry, as we have remarked before, is quite away from the song.”

A critic’s regret that contemporary verse had left singing behind · Essay, Saturday Review of Literature, 1930

• Modernity
• Music
• Poetry

“The detective story pure and simple has as definite limitations of form as the sonnet in poetry.”

Genre craft compared to a strict lyric form · Essay, Saturday Review of Literature, 1926

• Fiction
• Form
• Poetry

“As I turn these poems over—if they are even to be called poems—I realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was.”

Poetry admitted as incomplete against a living character · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Loss
• Personality
• Poetry

“Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.”

Art as sweetness drawn from experience that also wounds · Preface, Man Possessed

• Life
• Poetry
• Suffering

“Why should a Negro's love poetry be offensive to the white man, who prides himself on being modern and civilized?”

Challenging the double standard that polices Black feeling in art · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Love
• Poetry
• Race

“I felt assurance that If We Must Die was just what I intended it to be, a universal poem.”

Taking later wartime use of the sonnet as proof of its wider intent · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Meaning
• Poetry
• War

“Even though many of my themes were racial, I wrote my poems to make a universal appeal.”

Insisting that protest themes need not cancel a general human address · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Poetry
• Race
• Readers

“I have always felt that my gift of song was something bigger than the narrow confining limits of any one people and its problems.”

Claiming a universal reach beyond any single racial brief · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Humanity
• Identity
• Poetry

“For I am so intensely subjective as a poet that I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium of mass sentiment.”

On discovering that a personal sonnet had become a public anthem · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Expression
• Poetry
• Poets

“I have nothing to give but my singing. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience.”

Reducing a life's gift to song drawn from experience · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Experience
• Poetry
• Vocation

“All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence.”

Casting the poet as itinerant singer fed by lived experience · Autobiography, A Long Way from Home, 1937

• Life
• Poetry
• Travel

“I have adhered to such of the older traditions as I find adequate for my most lawless and revolutionary passions and moods.”

Holding that inherited forms can carry radical feeling · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Poetry
• Rebellion
• Tradition

“I have never studied poetics; but the forms I have used I am convinced are the ones I can work in with the highest degree of spontaneity and freedom.”

Defending traditional verse as a vehicle of instinct rather than academic rule · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Form
• Freedom
• Poetry

“I own allegiance to no master. I have never found it possible to accept in entirety any one poet.”

A declaration of artistic independence from schools and single models · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Independence
• Poetry
• Poets

“Poetry is all very well. But when you are reduced to seventeen cents and some stamps.”

Comic collision of lyric vocation and cash shortage · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Money
• Poetry
• Poverty

“Let some of your rules as to form go, and sing.”

Preference for music and singing over strict construction · Letter to Alfred Gordon

• Form
• Music
• Poetry

“You hold the form of a poem of supreme importance; I believe in the supremacy of thought.”

Statement of poetics against rigid scansion and the heavy mechanism of verse · Letter to Alfred Gordon

• Form
• Poetry
• Thought

“Being a poet in the present state of the market is like saying How is your hare-lip today?”

Wry comment on the awkwardness and poor market for verse · Letter to Helena Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Humour
• Poetry
• Profession

“I am tortured by the passionate desire to create beauty, to sing something of the impossible songs I have heard.”

On the unrest that drove his early verse · Letter after Romantic Ballads, 1888

• Beauty
• Desire
• Poetry

“Occupation, Religion and Poetry make a strong fence against the inroads of unavailing grief.”

Work, faith, and verse as a defence against fruitless mourning · Letter quoting and forwarding consolation after Lady Beaumont's return to Coleorton

• Faith
• Grief
• Poetry

“I will ask you only one thing, reader: to pronounce my verses well and fit your voice to their passion, and not read them in the manner of a letter.”

Original: Je te supliray seulement d'une chose, lecteur, de vouloir bien prononcer mes vers et accomoder ta voix à leur passion, et non comme quelques uns les lisent, plustost à la façon d'une missive. — Verse meant to be spoken with feeling, not scanned like prose · Preface to La Franciade (French)

• Poetry
• Reading
• Voice

“Give the name of poet to him who can make such a work, and not to the versifier, composer of epigrams, sonnets, satires, elegies and other such small scraps, where artifice cannot stretch far.”

Original: Donne-luy nom de poëte, et non au versificateur, composeur d'epigrammes, sonnets, satyres, elegies, et autres tels menus fatras, où l'artifice ne se peut estendre. — A sharp line drawn between the true poet and the mere maker of verses · Preface on the heroic poem, La Franciade (French)

• Craft
• Poetry
• Poets

“You will first have conceptions that are high, great and beautiful, and not trailing on the ground.”

Original: Tu auras en premier lieu les conceptions hautes, grandes, belles, et non traînantes à terre. — Elevation of thought as the first duty of the poet · Abrégé de l'art poétique français, 1565 (French)

• Excellence
• Imagination
• Poetry