“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.”

“I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love—but if you should deny me the thousand and first—‘t would put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.”

“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance".”

“How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.”

“I still don't know how to work out a poem. A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.”

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

“Two souls with but a single thought,Two hearts that beat as one!”