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"
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— 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"
preview | full record— 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...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
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
"Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)