“I thought nothing about the strict Italian model; the verses naturally flowed in unpremeditated harmony, as my ear directed.”

He privileges ear and unity of feeling over inherited sonnet rules · Introduction, Scenes and Shadows of Days Departed, 1837

• Music
• Originality
• Poetry

“But there is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings, even in poetry.”

A brief critical axiom from his defence of the early sonnets as lived emotion · Preface to the Sonnets, 1805

• Feeling
• Honesty
• Poetry

“We have been so often told that poetry exists in inanimate objects, that we seem to believe it, and thus become the dupes of our own phraseology.”

A warning against treating picturesque objects as if they were themselves the source of verse · Prose on poetry in the Pope controversy

• Language
• Nature
• Poetry