Essays on Poetic Theory
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By William Carlos Williams 1944
The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It...
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By Langston Hughes 1926
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write...
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By Gertrude Stein 1925
There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are...
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By T. S. Eliot 1920
Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that...
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By T. S. Eliot 1920
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most,...
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By D. H. Lawrence 1919
It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity. And when...
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By Ezra Pound 1918
A RETROSPECT There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect. In the spring or early summer of...
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By Amy Lowell 1915
In March, 1914, a volume appeared entitled “Des Imagistes.” It was a collection of the work of various young poets, presented together as a school. This school has been widely...
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By Mina Loy 1914
DIE in the Past Live in the Future. THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting. IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed. AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond...
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By Wyndham Lewis 1914
Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town! We stand for the Reality of the Present—not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past. We want...
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By Ezra Pound 1914
VORTEX. POUND. ______ The vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. We use the words “greatest efficiency” in the precise sense—as they would be used...
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By T. E. Hulme 1911
[Speculations, 113—40] I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this...
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By Matthew Arnold 1880
“The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer...
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By Gerard Manley Hopkins 1864
To Alexander William Mowbray Baillie Sept. 10. 1864. Dear Baillie,— Your letter has been sent to me from Hampstead. It has just come, and I do a rare thing with me, begin at...
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By Walt Whitman 1855
America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . ....
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By Edgar Allan Poe 1846
Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of “Barnaby Rudge,” says—“By the way, are you aware that Godwin...
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By Margaret Fuller 1846
A DIALOGUE. POET. CRITIC. Poet. Approach me not, man of cold, steadfast eye and compressed lips. At thy coming nature shrouds herself in dull mist; fain would she hide her sighs and...
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By Ralph Waldo Emerson 1844
A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon’s edge, Searched with Apollo’s privilege; Through man,...
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By Percy Bysshe Shelley 1821
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by...
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By Thomas Love Peacock 1820
Qui inter hæc nutriuntur non magis sapere possunt, quam bene olere qui in culinâ habitant. [Those so trained (in schools of rhetoric) can no more acquire good taste than those who...
