When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Each young person is a poet of sorts, trying to sort out the poetics of their inner life and its relation to the great world around it. Each elder is a philosopher of sorts, trying to sort out the meanings and gleanings of a life as well as the necessary implications of the presence of death.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means.
But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

"I like youth, and I like the real newness, which always seems to me to be a development out of the old — not a bombshell. But I'm not sure that some of the writers who are claiming those qualities today are as new and young as the elderly critics tell us. I feel surest of my young writers when I don't hear their joints creaking with the strain to be new.
...
"We must remember how badly Keats and Shelley were treated in their day, mustn't we?"

"But the Della Cruscans, who were really bad, were sat upon, too, weren't they?" said Miss Bird. "And, after all, your argument would apply to bosh as well as to beautiful things."

"Victorian, Miss Bird, Victorian," said Basil, wagging a playful finger at her. He had never heard of the Della Cruscan poets, but it was one of his principles never to give himself away in such things. "The conventional mind is the enemy, you know, in this country. I always admire that fellow — what's his name — who dedicated his book in those six words: 'To the British Public, these pearls!' We must think for ourselves. We mustn't be too conventional, you know."

"But — that's exactly — I don't want to think what the fashion of the moment and the newspapers tell me I ought to think. At least, I don't want to do it mechanically. And I don't mean what you think I mean," stammered poor Miss Bird, blushing and puzzled at her inability to penetrate that superior armor with a perfectly sound and pointed weapon. The Helmstone debates had not yet taught her that you cannot argue with an alleged "modern" who is so pleased with himself (and so ancient a type) that he waives your own remarks and hears nothing but his own blood purring in his ears."

Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.

"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have