Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (4)

from William Blake
I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you. My heart is full of futurity.

from William Wordsworth
They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness.

from Dorothy Wordsworth
We were glad to leave Dumfries, which is no agreeable place to them who do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth. We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground.

from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to one is involved in the solution of the other.

from George Gordon Byron
Ye, who aspire to "build the lofty rhyme,"
Believe not all who laud your false "sublime."

from Percy Bysshe Shelley
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world.

from Johann von Goethe, as transcribed by Johann Peter Eckermann
If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and as soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet; he must bid farewell to his free spirit, his unbiased view, and draw over his ears the cap of bigotry and blind hatred.

from John Keats
A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity--he is continually in for--and filling some other Body--