Date: 1831

"The sublimest poet that ever sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

At a period in history the mind of man may be imagined "sunk into a profound sleep"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: January, 1833

"Considered as poetry, they [ballads] are of the lowest and most elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live wholly immersed in outward things, ...

— Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873)

Date: January, 1833

"Descriptive poetry consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as they appear, not as they are; and it paints them, not in their bare and natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the colors of the imagination set in action by the feelings."

— Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)