harem of words

He kept as it were a harem of words, to which he was constant and absolutely faithful. Some he favoured more than others, but he neglected none. He used them more often out of compliment than of necessity.

—Edward Thomas, speaking of Swinburne, Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study (Mitchell Kennerley, 1912)

each word

In a poem, each word has to be right and contribute to the whole; in a story only every sentence. In a novel only every page.

—Alison Laurie, Real People (Penguin, 1978)

more fully in verse

Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinions—hard as rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting.

—Thomas Hardy
[Notebook entry, 17 October 1896]

poems of anonymous

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)