Samuel Taylor Coleridge — a remark

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“A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.”

Advising poets to transform observed nature through imaginative recollection rather than mere copying · Table Talk, 22 September 1830

About Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772–25 July 1834

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in Ottery St Mary, Devon, and died on 25 July 1834 at Highgate, near London. He occupies an unusual and commanding place in English literary history: he was at once one of the makers of Romantic poetry, a revolutionary critic of Shakespeare and poetic language, a…

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