Date: 1802

"With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey, / With my outward a thistle across the way."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

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)

Date: 1811

"The senses are the only inlets of knowledge, and there is an inward sense that had persuaded me of this."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"[1] and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

" For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The former [i.e., conception] is as a mirror which reflects, the latter [i.e., expression] as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the un...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)