entity of direct appeal

Let me interpose here this axiom of criticism: by explaining the nature of a work of art, we do not explain it away. It is an entity of direct appeal; we do not, in the process of appreciation…unfold the process of creation.

—Herbert Read, Form in Modern Poetry (Sheed & Ward, 1933)

never finished

A poem is never finished: it's always an accident that puts a stop to it--i.e., gives it to the public.

—Paul Valéry, "Littérature," Œuvres II (1960).

(W.H. Auden altered this statement to “Poems are never finished; they are abandoned.”)

matter of rendering

I desired to see English become at once more colloquial and more exact, verse more fluid and more exacting of its practitioners, and above, as I have said, that it should be realized that poetry, as it were dynamically, is a matter of rendering, not comment.

—Ford Madox Ford, foreword to the Imagist Anthology, 1930