“Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.”

Insisting that a poet must ultimately stand or fall by the language they create · Essay on poetry and politics, collected essays

• Poetry
• Truth

“I hate writing, I love having written.”

Capturing the tension between creative labour and artistic satisfaction · Conversation / aphorism

• Art
• Poetry

“Instead, poetry is regarded by the Indian as a heightening, an intensifying, of life.”

Presenting poetry as a means of experiencing life more fully · Essay, A Note on Primitive Poetry

• Poetry
• Truth

“Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!”

Noguchi's direct invitation to Western poets to experiment with the Japanese short poetic form · Essay, 'A Proposal to American Poets', 1904

• Art
• Poetry

“I am not a poet. I am a historian.”

Presenting his poetry as a record of historical experience and consciousness · Conversation, as reported in biographical accounts

• Memory
• Poetry
• Time

“In most cases the timely ode is somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's editorial of literature.”

Warning that poetry tied too closely to passing events may lose its vitality when those events recede · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Literature
• Poetry
• Time

“Mr. Riccaltoun's poem on Winter, which I still have, first put the design into my head—in it are some masterly strokes which awakened me.”

Acknowledges the spark that started The Seasons · Letter to Dr Cranstoun, September 1725

• Influence
• Inspiration
• Poetry

“The currents of song came from every source from which the national character was forming; all, more or less, striving to present a unified consciousness of native art.”

Presenting poetry as an expression of many cultural currents within a nation · Introduction, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1924

• Culture
• Identity
• Poetry

“Art may depend on exasperation rather than inspiration to break its bonds, but exasperation is not inspiration.”

Distinguishing creative frustration from genuine inspiration · Preface, Shadowy Thresholds (1919)

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

Linking poetry with moments of heightened perception and human happiness · A Defence of Poetry

• Joy
• Poetry

“Now a fact that thus stands for another is its metaphor.”

A concise definition of metaphor as representative correspondence · Lecture, Nature of Poetry, 1857

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.”

Emphasising poetry’s power to examine human experience and values · The Study of Poetry (essay)

• Life
• Poetry
• Truth

“To the experienced these new "isms" are but aspects of a general and unrestrained reaction toward realism.”

Seeing fashionable schools as part of a broader realist reaction · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Art
• Poetry

“And as they are of no school they will be fresh, as the old delights of earth are ever fresh.”

Arguing that poetry independent of schools and fashions can retain its freshness · Letter to Louise Chandler Moulton, quoted in Representative Women of New England

• Independence
• Poetry
• Tradition

“He carries the same terminology into his courtship songs, and thereby creates a new idiom.”

Observing how everyday language can generate a distinctive poetic voice · Review, Mr. Lomax's Second Anthology

• Love
• Poetry

“For one of the troubles with poetry in America is that it is too often reviewed by poets—who cannot in one case out of a hundred be trusted with that task.”

Questioning the impartiality of poets who review one another · Preface, Trails Sunward (1917)

• Poetry
• Truth

“Every one should read his book, for it will bring him face to face with a very prince among poets and with a very summer among centuries.”

Celebrating a translation that opens a radiant poetic world · Essay, Homer and Theocritus

• Beauty
• Joy
• Poetry

“Verse-writing in the year 1920 is a professional occupation.”

Opens his survey by treating poetry as a career, not a vocation only · Book, Some Contemporary Poets, 1920

• Modernity
• Poetry
• Profession

“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

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.”

Describing the poet’s radical capacity for imaginative identification · Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 27 October 1818

• Art
• Poetry

“Even so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic varieties.”

Presenting the traditional ballad as a foundation from which many poetic forms developed · Introduction to Ballad Book

• Literature
• Poetry
• Tradition

“There are some words that are like a flight of steps that end in mid-air, and there is nothing but the sky above them.”

Describing language that carries thought to the edge of the unsayable · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Poetry
• Truth

“That any man should seriously declare against that divine art is really amazing.”

Poetry defended as a divine art against fashionable contempt · Preface to Winter, 1726

• Art
• Criticism
• Poetry

“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