Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.