The Sacred Wood Essays on Poetry and Criticism

the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the person

it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify.

the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of the poem

But poetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can deal with this idea when it has reached the point of immediate acceptance,

the man who is trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may be trying to realize ideas,

It was incapable of complete expansion into pure vision.

applied itself to life too uniformly

perhaps the basis of the error is his apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet, namely, that the latter endeavours “to produce in us a state.”

the philosophy is essential to the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic beauty of the parts

If any ancient “philosophical” poetry retains its value, a value which we fail to find in modern poetry of the same type, we investigate on the assumption that we shall find some difference to which the mere difference of date is irrelevant.