“Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.”

“The child begins with crude sex alone. It innocently indulges itself in sensual pleasures. It loves kissing and to be kissed, stroking and to be stroked, fondly contemplating its excretions. The civilized society into which it is born magnifies the importance of these insignificant local sensations, gives them intellectual depth. It creates a handsome receptacle, love, to contain the humours of this unnaturally enlarged instinct.”

“Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.”

“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.”

“An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age”

“Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.”

“The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.”

“Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities.”

“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.”

“In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.”