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No good poem, however confessional is may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

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Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

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No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

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A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

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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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