“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”

“We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.”

“Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”

“One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet 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 than that from which it is 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.”

“Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.His name, as I ought to have told you before,Is really Asparagus. That's such a fussTo pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats —But no longer a terror to mice or to rats.For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.And whenever he joins his friends at their club(which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.For he once was a Star of the highest degree —He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.”

“Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson!You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae!That corpse you planted last year in your garden,Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!”

“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.”