A Poet Reflects

“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and translate the passions which are its material.

—T. S. Eliot, from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Sacred Wood (Routledge, 1920)

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die.  Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence … Words, strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

—T. S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton,” section V, lines 137-153, in Four Quartets (Harvest/HBJ, 1943, 1971).

Photograph: T. S. Eliot by John Loengard, 1956.

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

—T.S. Eliot, from his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot edited by Frank Kermode (Mariner Books, 1975).

                       “Poetry is not an expression of personality,

                                                         but an escape from personality.” —T.S. Eliot