“the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence [….] This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional” (467).
“Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it” (468).
“What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career” (468).
“The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (468).
“The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (469).
“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all” (470).
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (470).
“[The poet] is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious; not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (471).