The Sacred Wood Quotes

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“In that case we must say that rhetoric is any adornment or inflation of speech which is not done for a particular effect but for a general impressiveness.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“The world of Swinburne does not depend upon some other world which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the Comedy is dependent upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole scheme is. The usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As the centre of gravity of emotions is more remote from a single human action, or a system of purely human actions, than in drama or epic, so the framework has to be more artificial and apparently more mechanical. It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be justified. The emotional structure within this scaffold is what must be understood—the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, all human emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also extended in significance by their place in the scheme.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For 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.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays On Poetry and Criticism