There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.