“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.”
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." 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.
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T.S. Eliot 270
20th century English author 1888–1965Related quotes
“Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?”
Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 424
Book II, Chapter 5, p. 274
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
“All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.”
Essay on Contemporary American Poetry, in Poetry & Drama (1914), edited by Harold Munro, Vol II
Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
An Open Letter To Miles Davis (1955)
Context: I think my own way. I don't think like you and my music isn't meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs. When and if I feel gay and carefree, I write or play that way. When I feel angry I write or play that way — or when I'm happy, or depressed, even.
Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry.
“From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.”
Source: Cibola Burn (2014), Chapter 45 (p. 458)
“Ambedkar was the first person to attain escape velocity and run away to US.”
Times of India, Times of India https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Rahul-Gandhi-gives-a-lesson-in-escape-velocity-to-dalits/articleshow/23756795.cms