Date: September 10, 1802
"A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies."
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1803
"A Whirlpool swallowing up each awful thought / That Heav'n had stamp'd, or education taught."
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1803
"And all the floating thoughts we find / Upon the surface of the mind."
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1807-8
"[T]hrough the cells / And channels of his phrensy-stricken brain / Rage and confusion rush'd; the solemn peal / Broke on his ear like his salvation's knell, / Whilst his vext conscience struggled, but too late, / To rend th' insatiate demon from his heart"
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
Date: 1807-8
"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
Date: November 10, 1813
"I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruptions prevents an earthquake."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: w. August 1814
"Fill for me a brimming bowl / *And let me in it drown my soul: */ But put therein some drug, designed */ To Banish Women from my mind."
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: 1815
The wavering motions of the mind are like "quivering light" reflected off a confined "crystal flood" in a brass cistern
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1816
"[T]ort'ring pangs" and inexplicable woe may "like a torrent" overwhelm the soul
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
Date: 1816
"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought / Too long and darkly, till my brain became, / In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, / A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)