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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.