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Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human mature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.

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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.

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I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

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Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

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My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

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It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

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Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

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The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

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The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

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Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

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