page 1 of 1     per page:
sorted by:

Date: September 10, 1802

"A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

preview | full record

Date: 1803

"A Whirlpool swallowing up each awful thought / That Heav'n had stamp'd, or education taught."

— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)

preview | full record

Date: 1807-8

"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

preview | full record

Date: November 10, 1813

"I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruptions prevents an earthquake."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

preview | full record

Date: February, 1821

"This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

preview | full record

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."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

preview | full record

Date: 1847

"I've dreamed in my life dreams that have staid with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."

— Brontë, Emily (1818-1848)

preview | full record

Date: 1850

"This faculty [Imagination/Reason] hath been the feeding source / Of our long labour: we have traced the stream / From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard /Its natal murmur; followed it to light / And open day"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

preview | full record

Date: 1850

"Behold an emblem of our human mind / Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, / Yet, like to eddying balls of foam / Within this whirlpool, they each other chase / Round and round, and neither find / An outlet nor a resting-place!"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

preview | full record

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.