T. S. Eliot Quotes on Literature (12 Quotes)

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

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 business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

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.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

The poetry does not matter.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

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

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.