The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.