When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.
The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
Oh, happy triumph of the poet! - to hear his verses wedded to sweet sounds, and warbled by the woman he loves!
A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.