“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation and reason.”

Explaining the use of stimulants as an escape from memory and loneliness rather than for enjoyment · Letter to Sarah Helen Whitman

• Drink
• Loneliness
• Memory

“The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness has given to the world all that which it has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.”

Linking poetic creation with humanity’s longing for an ideal beauty · Essay on poetics, published 1850

• Art
• Beauty
• Poetry

“It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles — the creation of supernal Beauty.”

Presenting music as the soul’s closest approach to transcendent beauty · Essay on poetics, published 1850

• Beauty
• Music
• Poetry