“These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child.”

Locating musical creativity in a community willing to embrace its own traditions · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Art
• Music

“The experience of poetry is not the experience of the thought, but of the words.”

Drawing attention to the sensuous force of poetic language · Lecture, later published as the essay The Name and Nature of Poetry

• Music
• Poetry

“Poems, however humble in their kind, if they be good in that kind, cannot read themselves.”

Emphasising the active role of the reader or reciter in bringing poetry alive · Essay, Of Poetry as Observation and Description, 1815

• Music
• Poetry

“First, the right words: secondly, those words in the right order: thirdly, the agreeable sound of them in sequence.”

Reducing poetic style to three practical disciplines of wording, order and sound · Address, The Necessity of Poetry, 1917

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“Every element has a sound, a voice, a spirit, and a life.”

Describing nature as animated, vocal, and spiritually significant · Natural-philosophical writing, in translation

• Faith
• Music
• Nature

“It is not a mere mechanical succession of beats and intervals.”

Distinguishing living rhythm from simple repetition or measurement. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Music

“Never having been one to think all subjects and forms proper for poetic consideration, I regard these jazz poems as interlopers in the company of the truly beautiful poems in other sections of the book.”

Draws a hard line between jazz experiment and what he counted as lyric beauty · Review of Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues, The Dark Tower, 1926

• Criticism
• Music
• Poetry

“My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are forever on the roads.”

Expressing affection for musicians, wanderers and lives lived in motion · Mearing Stones, Change

• Freedom
• Joy
• Music

“I wrote it merely because I liked the air so much, and I put these words to it, never fearing questions as to the authorship.”

A rare first-person explanation of how one of her best-known songs came into being · Letter recalling the origin of The Land o' the Leal

• Music
• Poetry
• Writing

“Sorrow shared through song ceases to be a burden and becomes a shared bridge.”

Describing how music and verse transform personal grief into communal connection · Letter to a Friend

• Consolation
• Music
• Sorrow

“A dirge may be in racing anapæsts, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours.”

Showing that metre does not carry a fixed emotional meaning · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

• Joy
• Music
• Poetry

“Metre, therefore, is no such false artifice as most exponents of radicalism would have us believe, but is instead a natural and inevitable embellishment to poesy.”

Defending poetic metre as an organic extension of humanity’s rhythmic instinct · Essay, Metrical Regularity

• Music
• Poetry
• Tradition

“There is delight in singing, though none hear beside the singer.”

Finding private fulfilment in the act of song itself · Imaginary Conversations

• Joy
• Music
• Solitude

“If that stumble you: do not rest the quaver. But make the quaver a crotchet”

A concise piece of performance advice for avoiding a rhythmic stumbling point · Manuscript annotation, British Library Add. MS 29996

• Art
• Music

“Most things I write I do for the sheer love of the music in them. Somehow or other, however, I find my poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys and his sorrows—mostly of the latter—and of the heights and the depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro.”

Music comes first, yet race keeps entering the poems of its own accord · Interview, Chicago Bee, 1927

• Emotion
• Music
• Poetry

“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

“It is extremely difficult for the trained musician to catch the intervals of Indian music, both in pitch and time.”

Recognising the difficulty of translating one musical tradition into another · Review, Tall Timber and a Loon

• Art
• Music

“I listen to it in infinite space and quietness.”

Evoking the contemplative stillness in which a small natural sound can seem boundless · Mearing Stones, By Lochros Mór

• Music
• Nature
• Solitude

“I don’t mind saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically hideous and stupidly monotonous performance I ever heard.”

Giving his uninhibited personal reaction to a performance of Wagner · Letter to Anna Harte, on Wagner's Tannhäuser, 1878

• Art
• Music

“Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.”

Imagining jazz as a vast form capable of absorbing many styles and voices · Essay, Jazz as Communication

• Art
• Music

“I am now about an Oratorio, which when finished will purchase you a gown.”

A warm promise to share the hoped-for proceeds of his work with his sister · Letter to Mary Chatterton, 20 July 1770

• Friendship
• Hope
• Music

“Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.”

Separating the human value of music from the financial rewards given its makers · Biographical writing on musicians

• Fame
• Joy
• Music

“The true artist plays with language as a musician plays with strings.”

Original: الشاعر الحقيقي يعزف باللغة كما يعزف الموسيقي على الأوتار — Draws a direct link between verse and music · Attributed essay statement (Arabic)

• Art
• Language
• Music

“Should they prove distasteful with the queasy-palated, or surfeited delight, yet with the sound I presume they will pleasingly relish.”

He trusts listeners of sound judgement over those jaded by fashion · Dedication to Sir Henry Fanshawe, First Set of English Madrigals, 1613

• Criticism
• Music
• Taste