“The nature of poetry is precisely the question that underlies the most difficult and serious questions that concern the human mind.”

Treating poetic theory as inseparable from fundamental questions of thought and feeling · Letter home, 1857

• Poetry
• Truth

“A picture that expresses something invisible by something visible.”

Offering a compact description of art that gives visible form to unseen meaning · Letter from Odsey House, 2 October 1857

• Art
• Beauty

“There is a poetical as well as a moral hypocrisy: and it is possible for the literary as well as the moral Pharisee to make void the living Law through dead tradition.”

Warning that inherited forms can become empty when detached from living truth · Lecture, Nature of Poetry, 1857

• Poetry
• Truth