“Poetry’s a mere drug, Sir.”

“Made poetry a mere mechanic art.”

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”

“Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests”

“Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones.”

“Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.”

“Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind.”

“There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.”

“I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.”

“There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired; which render mere Prose-men Infidels to their Divinity.”