no art, only artists

There is no such thing as art...There are only artists who are favoured with a gift of balancing shapes and colours until they get it right. And, rarer still, who possess the integrity of character which never rests content with half solutions, but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950)

almost, almost

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

—Wallace Stevens, opening lines of “Man Carrying Thing”

objective correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

—T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems"

mature poets steal

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. 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. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot, "Philip Massinger," The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922)

metaphoric flaw

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.

—Robert Frost, "Education By Poetry"

momentary stay against confusion

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood—and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad—the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

—Robert Frost, "The Figure A Poem Makes"

a table or a chair

her [Sylvia Plath's] attitude to her verse was artisanlike: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.

—Ted Hughes, in his introduction to The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes (Harper & Row, 1981)

long enough

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than pleasure.

—Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” The Lives of the English Poets

fifteen thousand

In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.”

—Joseph Epstein, "T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture"
commentarymagazine.com (November 2010)