“It is an axiom that emotion must flow spontaneously into appropriate language.”

Restates a romantic law of diction against calculated style · Book, Some Contemporary Poets, 1920

• Emotion
• Language
• Poetry

“They bewitch the memory, having once caught it, and insist on saying themselves over and over.”

Capturing the way memorable poetry continues to sound inwardly long after reading · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Language
• Memory
• Poetry

“Anglo-Saxon has not been cultivated into a better form, but has been corrupted for the worse, since King Alfred's days.”

Arguing that the development of standard English had involved a loss rather than an improvement in the language · Se Gefylsta

• Change
• History
• Language

“Language expands when the imagination refuses to be bounded by convention.”

Original: تتسع اللغة عندما يرفض الخيال أن تحده التقاليد — A defense of poetic innovation and freedom · Literary reflection (Arabic)

• Convention
• Imagination
• Language

“I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.”

The painstaking search for the right word · Conversation / letter (as commonly attributed)

• Language
• Truth
• Writing

“Scansion isolates, for the sake of analysis, the basic metrical units of verse—feet; the same analytical scrutiny must, I believe, be given to the basic phonetic units of speech.”

Words weighed as carefully as feet in a line · Essay, A Study in English Metrics

• Language
• Poetry
• Precision

“If dialect is missed in this collection, it is enough to state that the day of dialect as far as Negro poets are concerned is in the decline.”

Treats literary dialect as a fading, often artificial medium rather than a required racial stamp · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

• Convention
• Language
• Poetry

“Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.”

Defining poetry through metaphor, implication and meanings that extend beyond literal statement · Lecture, Education by Poetry, 1930

• Language
• Metaphor
• Poetry

“Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most personal, and that is why musicians do not like words.”

Wryly contrasting the abstract character of music with the personal nature of language · Essay, The Musician and the Orator

• Language
• Music
• Wit

“The expression of a feeling is always absurd.”

Original: L'expression d'un sentiment est toujours absurde. — Valéry highlights the difficulty of translating inner feeling into adequate external language. · Monsieur Teste (French)

• Expression
• Feeling
• Language

“The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.”

Observing that spoken brilliance often needs durable writing if it is to survive its moment · Essay collection, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Fame
• Language
• Writing

“Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.”

Explaining how literary examples preserve and expand linguistic meaning · Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language

• Art
• Language

“The language of the age is never the language of poetry.”

Expressing his belief that poetry requires a language distinct from ordinary contemporary speech · Letter to Richard West, 8 April 1742

• Language
• Poetry
• Style

“The English press would do well to remember that the Welshman has two eyes: one reads Welsh and the other reads English.”

Original: Byddai yn eithaf peth i'r wasg Seisnig gofio fod dau lygad gan y Cymro—un yn darllen Cymraeg, a'r llall yn darllen Saesneg. — A witty defence of Welsh readers against careless outside criticism · Gorsedd paper, National Eisteddfod Rhyl, 1892 (Welsh)

• Identity
• Language
• Wit

“Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it; not the sentiment but the words in which the idea is clothed.”

Locating poetry primarily in expression rather than subject matter · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

• Language
• Poetry
• Style

“Believing in the human word, spoken or written, is as indispensable to humans as trusting the firmness of the ground.”

Original: Croire à la parole humaine, parlée ou écrite, est aussi indispensable aux humains que de se fier à la fermeté du sol. — Human communication depends upon a basic trust that makes collective life possible. · Cahiers (French)

• Communication
• Language
• Trust

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end.”

An exaggerated but revealing statement of his belief in a writer's mastery of language · Letter, 20 March 1953

• Knowledge
• Language
• Writing

“Literature decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the language which unites it to all life.”

Defining literature's vitality through its power to renew the language of shared experience · Essay collection, The Cutting of an Agate

• Language
• Life
• Literature

“Language is an imperfect instrument for that which touches the soul.”

Original: Die Sprache ist ein unvollkommenes Instrument für das, was die Seele berührt. — Addresses the struggle of translating internal sensation into words · Conversational remark recalled by Karl Röck, 1913 (German)

• Language
• Soul
• Writing

“The poem is a thing made out of the language, and it is not a representation of something else.”

Defining poetry as an autonomous verbal construction rather than a copy of an external reality · Essay, The New Criticism

• Art
• Language
• Poetry

“I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.”

Defining good correspondence as natural conversation transferred to paper · Letter to Cassandra Austen, 3 January 1801

• Communication
• Language
• Writing

“This anthology has not been compiled for the philologist, but for those who have learnt to speak broad Yorkshire at their mother's knee, and have not wholly unlearnt it at their schoolmaster's desk.”

Claiming dialect verse for native speakers rather than for specialists · Preface, Yorkshire Dialect Poems

• Education
• Language
• Readers

“A poet comprehends the words which express the relation of things, and these words are the elements of his art.”

Treating language and the relationships between things as the fundamental materials of poetry. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

• Art
• Language
• Poetry

“Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted.”

Respect for the sacred and poetic in language · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

• Language
• Poetry
• Sacred