“He disdains all things above his reach, and preferreth all countries above his own.”
Thomas Overbury (1581–1613) (1581–1613) English poet and essayist
Miscellaneous Works: An Affectate Traveller.
“The modern poet is above all things honest. He does not write for fame nor for money. He merely writes to vent his own spleen, his own bitterness. His own sense of disparity between the ugliness of the world that is and the beauty of the world that might be.”
Phases in English Poetry (1928)
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Herbert Read42
English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art 1893–1968Related quotes
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters
Foreword
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.
Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna
[Swami Saradeshananda, The Holy Mother's Reminiscences, Vedanta Kesari, 1976-1981]
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 24
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.
Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
Context: Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
Edwin Lefèvre book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Source: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), Chapter VIII, p. 89