Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.
The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable.