Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.
How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.
You are not the feelings or the thoughts or the contents of your awareness. None of these are who you are. You are the fullness of your Being, the substance of your presence.
Every human actions becomes dangerous when it is deprived of human feeling. When they are performed with feeling and respect for human values, all activities become constructive.
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
Scurrility has no object in view but incivility; if it is uttered from feelings of petulance, it is mere abuse; if it is spoken in a joking manner, it may be considered raillery.
I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.