The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
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.
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
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.
It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics.... Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose in cruelty against themselves, admitting that they are pandering to, and despising, the lower self.
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.