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
"So when the breeze of life is felt / To ruffle, how those fancies melt; / And real woe,--ideal rest, / Flutter uncertain in the breast."
preview | full record— Reynolds, John Hamilton (1796-1852)
Date: w. August 1814
"Fill for me a brimming bowl / *And let me in it drown my soul: */ But put therein some drug, designed */ To Banish Women from my mind."
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: 1815
The wavering motions of the mind are like "quivering light" reflected off a confined "crystal flood" in a brass cistern
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1816
"[T]ort'ring pangs" and inexplicable woe may "like a torrent" overwhelm the soul
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
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)
Date: 1816
"Nor is it discontent to keep the mind / Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil / In the hot throng, where we become the spoil / Of our infection"
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
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...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1817, 1818
There is "One mind, the type of all, the moveless wave / Whose calm reflects all moving things that are"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1817, 1818
"With ever-changing notes it floats along, / Till on my passive soul there seemed to creep / A melody, like waves on wrinkled sands that leap"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)