“Come what will my life has borne flower and fruit—it is a glorious, successful, felicitous life, I thank God and you.”

Looking upon his life as fulfilled after his marriage to Elizabeth · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 14 September 1846

• Gratitude
• Life
• Love

“I believe the fault comes from a too-sweet sense of the freedom of being true with you, telling you all, hiding nothing.”

Connecting intimacy with the freedom to speak without concealment · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 15 June 1846

• Communication
• Freedom
• Truth

“I believe in you absolutely, utterly.”

A remarkably direct expression of the trust at the centre of their developing relationship · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 30 August 1845

• Love
• Sincerity
• Trust

“I am naturally earnest, in earnest about whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I think of another.”

A concise statement of the concentration and seriousness he brought to creative work · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 30 April 1845

• Character
• Sincerity
• Writing

“One of these days I shall describe a country I have seen in my soul only, fruits, flowers, birds and all.”

Asserting the imagination's ability to create landscapes independent of direct experience · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 16 April 1845

• Imagination
• Nature
• Writing

“All you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas—or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be.”

Suggesting that travel tests and clarifies what the imagination already possesses · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 16 April 1845

• Discovery
• Imagination
• Travel

“I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in the sense of fulfilling a duty.”

Distinguishing enjoyment of composition from a deeper sense of artistic obligation · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 12 March 1845

• Duty
• Work
• Writing

“The fearless fresh living work you describe, is the only Poem to be undertaken now by you or anyone that is a Poet at all.”

Urging poetry to engage courageously with living experience rather than inherited convention · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 12 March 1845

• Courage
• Originality
• Poetry

“An instructed eye loves to see where the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow.”

Arguing that apparent excess can reveal the individual choices and pleasures of an artist · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 January 1845

• Art
• Criticism
• Style

“You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.”

A striking description of his dramatic method of revealing truth through imagined voices · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 January 1845

• Poetry
• Style
• Truth

“The musician speaks on the note he sings with; there is no change in the scale, as he diminishes the volume into familiar intercourse.”

On the sincerity that should carry from a poet's grand work into his ordinary voice · Essay on Shelley, preface to the spurious Shelley letters, 1851

• Art
• Truth

“Italy was my University.”

His reply when asked whether he had attended Oxford or Cambridge · Remembered remark, as reported by contemporaries

• Art
• Memory

“When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant, God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.”

A much-repeated joke on the obscurity of Sordello, likely apocryphal · Anecdote reported after his death, of disputed authenticity

• Poetry

“My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.”

His own summary of what all his poetry was really about · Dedicatory preface to Sordello, addressed to Joseph Milsand, 1863

• Art
• Poetry

“It is all teaching, and the people hate to be taught.”

A blunt aside on why difficult poetry meets resistance · Letter to John Ruskin, 10 December 1855

• Poetry
• Truth

“A poet's affair is with God, to whom he is accountable, and of whom is his reward: look elsewhere, and you find misery enough.”

Defending the poet's inward accountability against demands for easy clarity · Letter to John Ruskin, 10 December 1855

• Art
• Faith
• Poetry

“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett—and I love you too.”

A celebrated declaration joining literary admiration with personal love · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 1845

• Love
• Poetry