only two creators

Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.

[Only God and the Poet deserve the name Creator.]

—Torquato Tasso

against style

There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style.

—Archibald MacLeish, from the poem "Invocation to the Social Muse"

breathing in

inspiration
c.1300, "immediate influence of God or a god," especially that under which the holy books were written, from O.Fr. inspiracion "inhaling, breathing in; inspiration," from L.L. inspirationem (nom. inspiratio), noun of action from pp. stem of L. inspirare "inspire, inflame, blow into," from in- "in" (see in- (2)) + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit). Literal sense "act of inhaling" attested in English from 1560s.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary.

should be an event

[Eliot writes in a letter to J.H. Woods, his former professor at Harvard.]

My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.

—T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot (vol. I, Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 285), edited by Valerie Eliot.

new image, new world

But phenomenology of the imagination cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, that images live directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new.

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, p. 47)

feeling for fragment

Our feeling for fragment as form is an explanation of free verse.

—J.V. Cunningham
(Quote comes from the class notes recorded by D.G. Myers in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar taught by J.V. Cunninghan in 1976.)