- The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material. Mere inventories of rocks are not poetry. But all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them.
- All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into Eternity with all that is ours, our thoughts, like small lost rafts, float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides: our names and a phrase or two, and little else.
- I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all, because we have loved a little that swart old city.
- I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on men. All tyrants have boons to confer. But service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field.
- I saw a workman fall with his scaffolding right from the summit of some vast hotel. And as he came down, I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and do this, for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall. And I could think of nothing but his folly in doing this futile thing, for not only would the man be unrecognizably dead in three seconds, but the very pole on which he tried to scratch whatever of his name he had time for was certain to be burnt in a few weeks for firewood.
- When I went to Cheam School I was given a lot of the Bible to read. This turned my thoughts eastward. For years no style seemed to me natural but that of the Bible, and I feared that I never would become a writer when I saw that other people did not use it.
- When I learned Greek at Cheam and heard of other gods, a great pity came on me for those beautiful marble people that had become forsaken. And this mood has never quite left me.
- If one who looked from a tower for a new star, watching for years the same part of the sky, suddenly saw it (quite by chance while thinking of other things), and knew it for the star for which he had hoped, how many millions of men would never care? And the star might blaze over deserts and forests and seas, cheering lost wanderers in desolate lands, or guiding dangerous quests; millions would never know it. And a poet is no more than a star.
- Of pure poetry there are two kinds: that which mirrors the beauty of the world in which our bodies are, and that which builds the more mysterious kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins, with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens singing still, and Alph going down to the darkness from Xanadu.
- [in 1917, during World War I] It is hard for a poet to live to see fame, even in times of peace. In these days it is harder than ever.
- Know that neither in any class, nor in any country, nor in any age, shall you predict the footfall of Pegasus, who touches the earth where he pleaseth and is bridled by whom he will.
- Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London, come with me, and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.
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