Quote #23
It is not the 'greatness,' the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
More from Thomas Stearns Eliot
- Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
- The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to mak…
- Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should…
- Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least some…
- The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man t…
- Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
- Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or tim…
- Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness.