"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination."

"I feel my fate to be a most unhappy one."

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"

"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."

"I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and have children by a Sonnet."