Biographia Literaria

"Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry."

"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."

"Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate."

"Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind."

"“Until you understand a writers ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”"

"The primary I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ."

"The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead."

"The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space."

"Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination."

"That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

"No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher."

"The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself."