10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by T. S. Eliot

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

“The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”

“Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.”

“What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.”

“Poetry is a mug’s game.”

“When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.”

– T.S. Eliot