“After her death in 1833 he maintained he wrote nothing of value, as his heart was not in his work.”

Acknowledges loss of creative drive following maternal influence and criticism · Reported remark after his mother's death

• Loss
• Motherhood
• Writing

“As to writing poetry, or doing anything else that is rational in this floating Inferno, it is almost next to a moral impossibility.”

Expresses frustration at naval life blocking literary work · Letter from HMS Venerable (1809)

• Frustration
• Poetry
• Writing

“England is the modern Carthage; the love of gold, the last corruption of man, pervades the whole state from the centre to the extremities.”

Denunciation of commercial greed as national decay · Letter (1809)

• Corruption
• England
• Greed

“The poetry of your Adonais is very beautiful; but when you write you never think of your audience. The number who understand you, and sympathise with you, is very small.”

Candid critique of Shelley's obscurity despite praising the elegy · Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley (c. 1821)

• Audience
• Criticism
• Poetry

“While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age.”

Contrasts useful knowledge with poetry's outdated nostalgia · Essay, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820)

• Knowledge
• Poetry
• Progress

“Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to make a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells.”

Argues that poetry belongs to society's childhood and has no place in mature intellect · Essay, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820)

• Childhood
• Intellect
• Poetry

“A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.”

Satirical dismissal of contemporary poetry as regressive amid advancing reason · Essay, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820)

• Poetry
• Poets
• Progress

“A poet in our time is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community.”

A sharp criticism of poets who idealise the past and resist the habits of modern society · Essay, The Four Ages of Poetry

• Civilization
• Criticism
• Poetry