Status Updates From The Major Works

'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of the unimaginable for a mere image.'

'Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, & that we are all one Life. A Poets Heart and Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature - and not merely held in solution & lose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies'.

'In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain the ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely, its untranslateableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.'

'In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.'

'Love's despair is but hope's pining ghost.'

'Resembles life what once was deem'd of light
Too ample in itself for human sght?
An absolute self? an element ungrounded?
All, that we see, all colors of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?
Is very life but by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath
A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?'

O what a wonder seems the fear of death,
seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep.