“originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.” Has BeensStatesDoneNovelPoetDiscoveryAimTechniqueSurprisingOriginalityBiologistScientific DiscoveryVetsEliotMendel Author:Randall Jarrell
“It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.” PeopleSeriousPoetFinanceFirmBizarreBankersBureaucratsEliot Author:Katy Lederer
“I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.” IfsThinkingKnowsStuffDecisionDoorsPoetQualifiedFrostBack DoorsEliot Author:Bob Dylan
“Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.” PeopleMenStillsSometimesWholeChoicesSubjectsPoetFellowsBritishBrilliantSillyGenerousShyPoundsPassagesRetiringAnnoyingSensibleCitizenshipExileCautiousSoothingEstimationEliotExpatriatesAmerican Citizenship Author:T.S. Mathews
“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” PeopleThinkingWayYearsBodyVoiceNaturalCommonBehindsWrittenPoetBirthMassForgottenTongueOutcomesSolitaryMasterpieceJaneAustenSavageryTamedEliotForerunnersBronteChaucerMarlowe Book:A Room of One's Own Source: A Room of One's Own
“I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.” ThinkingWayWritingImportantTogetherMovingReadingStylePoetBritishPoundsPriestsAssuranceModernismAnthologyPhilipMoving AwayEliotHartCranes Author:Billy Collins
“I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.” ThinkingWritingReasonWholeAmericaYoungLinesKnowingPoetPeriodsCriticismEnglandAgreeHistoricalUniversityPracticalsBackgroundsNot SureFrighteningEmphasisDylanEliotYeats Author:Sylvia Plath
“Every poet gets to choose what kind of community he or she serves with the poems, and it's true that there is a community for very difficult, challenging poetry. It's a community that's established itself over the last 80 years, that was originally, in effect, really started by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. They believed that poetry ought to contain learning, that it ought to rise upon all the learning that went before.” KindDifficultCommunityChallengesPoetEliot Author:Ted Kooser
“I began as a poet, moved to short fiction, then to novel writing, and, for the past twelve years, back to stories. I sometimes wonder if the pendulum will swing all the way back to where I began. As T.S. Eliot says, "In my end is my beginning," but for now I'm staying put, sitting tight, and loving the short story form way too much to leave it quite yet.” WritingSometimesPastWonderNovelPoetMovedShort StoryEliot Author:Jack Driscoll