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."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1814
"There is a war, a chaos of the mind, / When all its elements convulsed, combined / Lie dark and jarring with perturbéd force, / And gnashing with impenitent Remorse"
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1814
"All, in a word, from which all eyes must start, / That opening sepulchre, the naked heart / Bares with its buried woes--till Pride awake, / To snatch the mirror from the soul, and break."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1814
"No single passion, and no ruling thought / That leaves the rest, as once, unseen, unsought, / But the wild prospect when the Soul reviews, / All rushing through their thousand avenues"
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: March 30, 1816
"Look on her features! and behold her mind / As in a mirror of itself defined."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"In my youth's summer I did sing of One, / The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"[I]n that Tale I find / The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, / Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"Since my young days of passion--joy, or pain-- / Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string-- / And both may jar."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"[H]e can tell / Why Thought seeks refuge in lone caves, yet rife / With airy images, and shapes which dwell / Still unimpaired, though old, in the Soul's haunted cell."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought / Too long and darkly, till my brain became, / In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, / A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)