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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Source: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent – II’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1922

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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Source: Unknown

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The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given , the emotion is immediately evoked.

Source: ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1922