As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.