Quotes by Lord Alfred Douglas

“But poetry is an affair of the spirit and people who imagine that they are going to turn themselves into great poets by an inordinate admiration of beautiful material things or beautiful people are fostering the most puerile of delusions. It follows that when I talk of the preoccupation with beauty as being absolutely necessary to the poet, I mean spiritual beauty and nothing else. The reason of this is that ethical beauty is at the back of all beauty. Beautiful forms, beautiful sounds, beautiful colours, beautiful faces are simply the channels by which spiritual perfection is suggested to our spirit, and the resulting yearning, the desperate struggle upwards of the soul towards the Supreme Beauty, however dimly and darkly 120 felt, is what produces all great art whether in poetry or in music, or in sculpture, or in painting. That is why all really great Art is founded on and springs from morality. Beauty in the sphere of the spirit is simply goodness in a greater or less degree. The difference between the highest Art and “ Art for Art’s sake ” corresponds to the difference between Philosophy and Sophistry.””

“The poet, therefore, is one who puts into a beautiful form the expression of an overpowering emotion, and it follows that his emotion must be quite exceptionally deep and sincere, and that it is the motive power of his style which without the emotion to inspire it would be as useless and dumb as an unplayed violin. To write poetry without sincerity is merely to play with words.””

“Further, unless a man is so sincere in his feelings of admiration for beauty as to live for a great part of his life under the impulse of such feelings, he would not and could not take the necessary pains to acquire such a difficult art as the art of poetry. When we say that a poet is “ born, not made,” we simply mean that certain persons have a natural deep instinct about beauty not possessed by other people, which urges them with an irresis- tible impulse to strive to express what they feel by means of an extraordinarily difficult and complicated art which can only be acquired by taking an enormous amount of trouble. Nobody, I imagine, really believes that a poet is “ born ” in the sense that he suddenly finds himself in early youth fully equipped with all the power to express himself in flawless verse without taking any trouble about it.””