Date: w. 1821, 1840
"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sister...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1839-1842
"My heart within / Melts as the wax."
preview | full record— Frere, John Hookham (1769-1846)
Date: 1848
We may like on our fled soul, like a "mother wild" on an "infant child" in an "eagle's claws"
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)