T. E. Hulme

“Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.”

“There is nothing to do but keep on.”

“All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.”

“Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.”

“The unit of significance in the poem is not the word but the phrase or sentence...a poet should consider the effect of the whole poem, not its local felicities.”

“My objection to metre is that it enables people to write verse with no poetic inspiration.”

“There were certain impressions I wanted to fix. I read verse models but none seemed to suitably express that kind of impression..until I came to read French vers libre which seemed to eactly fitr the case.”

“It is a delicate & difficult art fitting rhythm to an idea...communicating momentary phases in a poet's mind.”

“The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.”

“A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.”

“The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you.”

“In the light of absolute values (religious or ethical) man himself is judged to be limited or imperfect, while he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he, himself can never be perfect.”

“Poetry is no more, no less than a mosaic of words, so great exactness is required for each one.”

“If literature (realistic) did really resemble life, it would be interminable, dreary, commonplace eating and dressing, buttoning, with here and there a patch of vividness. Life is composed of exquisite moments and the rest is shadows of them.”

“Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.”

“Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.”