There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.
I was thinking, “So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I’ll be able to make people read my books now.
The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams—mad but interesting.
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money.
I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.
To resist the social pressure now put even on one’s leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one’s own way, than ever before.
Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.
…but [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.
But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.
Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.
Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.
You don’t want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it has been written the world would end.
I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
There’s no money in poetry but then there’s no poetry in money either.
What we now call ‘finance’ is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.