The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
‘The Waste Land’ (1922) pt. 5
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1919)
Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.
‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1919)
We know too much and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion,
and so is our religion.
‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’ (1928)
Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of the critic.
‘The Function of Criticism’ (1925)
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never
recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was due to the influence of the two most powerful
poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921)
Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.
‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921)
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.
‘The Sacred Wood’ (1920) ‘Hamlet and his Problems’
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
‘The Sacred Wood’ (1920) ‘Philip Massinger’
Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they
did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.
‘The Sacred Wood’ (1920) ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’
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.
‘The Sacred Wood’ (1920) ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’
To me...[The Wasteland] was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse
against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.
‘The Wasteland’ (ed. Valerie Eliot, 1971) epigraph