“Genius is always individual.”

Defending individuality as the source of intellectual and social advancement · Letter to Isa Blagden, c. 1850

• Individuality
• Originality
• Society

“I do not believe in purification without suffering, in progress without struggle, in virtue without temptation.”

Linking moral growth with the necessity of resistance, difficulty and testing · Letter to Isa Blagden, c. 1850

• Growth
• Struggle
• Suffering

“I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment!”

Revealing the severe self-doubt that could follow the exhilaration of composition · Letter to Robert Browning, 20 March 1845

• Criticism
• Humility
• Poetry

“I seem to live while I write—it is life, for me.”

Expressing how completely the creative act was bound up with her sense of being alive · Letter to Robert Browning, 20 March 1845

• Life
• Poetry
• Writing

“Whatever acts upon you, becomes you—and whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you and becomes you.”

Observing how experience continually enters into and reshapes individual identity · Letter to Robert Browning, 18 April 1845

• Change
• Experience
• Identity

“In fact I have long left off thinking that logic proves anything—it doesn't, you know.”

A characteristically playful scepticism about the limits of formal reasoning · Letter to Robert Browning, 18 April 1845

• Humour
• Mind
• Truth

“For I think the world wider than I once thought it, and I see God's love broader than I once saw it.”

Expressing the expansion of her religious understanding through solitude and suffering · Letter to H. S. Boyd, March 1845

• Faith
• Growth
• Love

“Writing poetry requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of itself.”

Describing poetic creation as dependent upon freedom as well as voluntary inspiration · Letter to H. S. Boyd, 1836

• Freedom
• Poetry
• Writing

“It seems to me from my personal experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions, and more goodness and tenderheartedness than we read of in the moralists.”

Affirming a generous view of human nature founded on personal experience · Letter to Robert Browning, 5 March 1845

• Experience
• Humanity
• Kindness

“What we call Life is a condition of the soul, and the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault.”

Presenting life as an inward process of moral and emotional growth · Letter to Robert Browning, 5 March 1845

• Growth
• Life
• Wisdom

“I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons—the wisdom of cheerfulness—and the duty of social intercourse.”

Drawing lessons of cheerfulness and human connection from prolonged adversity · Letter to Robert Browning, 5 March 1845

• Community
• Hope
• Wisdom

“I do not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism and it is possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours.”

A candid acknowledgement that serious criticism need not require passive acceptance · Letter to Robert Browning, 11 January 1845

• Criticism
• Sincerity
• Writing

“Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me.”

Expressing the special depth of understanding she felt between fellow poets · Letter to Robert Browning, 11 January 1845

• Communication
• Friendship
• Poetry

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

Presenting gratitude as the emotional foundation of enduring art · Essay on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth