Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

... how much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.