“Everyone feels. Only some are given the gift of preserving, like a treasure, the living memory of what they have felt. I believe these are the poets.”

Original: Todo el mundo siente. Sólo á algunos seres les es dado el guardar, como un tesoro, la memoria viva de lo que han sentido. Yo creo que éstos son los poetas. — For Bécquer, the poet's distinctive gift is preserving the life of emotion in memory. · Letter II, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Feeling
• Memory
• Poetry

“They are gathered together because the book affords an opportunity to record appeals which are—save in one or two cases—to scarcely tangible emotions: those emotions which float across the mind like Coleridge's cloud, thin and pale and very high, and are of import to the very few.”

Defends slight, elusive feeling as a proper subject of verse · Prefatory note, The Budded Branch, 1918

• Emotion
• Feeling
• Poetry

“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.”

On the primacy of feeling over thought · Lecture, i: six nonlectures (commonly attributed)

• Feeling
• Individuality
• Self

“The poetry is you, I told you, because poetry is feeling, and feeling is woman.”

Original: La poesía eres tú, te he dicho, porque la poesía es el sentimiento, y el sentimiento es la mujer. — Bécquer identifies poetry with feeling rather than with literary technique or formal rules. · Letter I, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Feeling
• Love
• Poetry

“If belief is enough to persuade, I feel what I write.”

Original: Si para persuadir basta creer, yo siento lo que escribo. — For Bécquer, genuine conviction gives writing its persuasive force. · Letter IV, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Faith
• Feeling
• Writing

“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

“I confined myself to fourteen lines, because fourteen lines seemed best adapted to unity of sentiment.”

The sonnet is chosen as a vessel for one mood rather than as an Italian formal exercise · Introduction, Scenes and Shadows of Days Departed, 1837

• Feeling
• Form
• Poetry

“The expression of a feeling is always absurd.”

Original: L'expression d'un sentiment est toujours absurde. — Valéry highlights the difficulty of translating inner feeling into adequate external language. · Monsieur Teste (French)

• Expression
• Feeling
• Language

“In some things I am more a woman than a man.”

Early admission of a nature that loved past the usual male reserve · Letter to John Elder

• Feeling
• Gender
• Identity

“You need only feel and think in order to understand me.”

Original: Como sólo de lo que he sentido y he pensado he de hablarte, te bastará sentir y pensar para comprenderme. — Understanding literature, in Bécquer's view, depends on shared human experience as much as intellectual analysis. · Letter I, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Feeling
• Thought
• Understanding

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

Distinguishes easy emotion from feeling that has held · Adagia, notebook aphorisms

• Art
• Emotion
• Feeling

“There are notes in the poet's intelligence that belong to that of woman, and these are the ones that express tenderness, passion and feeling.”

Original: En la escala de la inteligencia del poeta hay notas que pertenecen á la de la mujer, y éstas son las que expresan la ternura, la pasión y el sentimiento. — He places tenderness and emotional sensitivity at the heart of poetic intelligence. · Letter I, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Feeling
• Poetry
• Tenderness

“They can be considered in no other light than as exhibiting occasional reflections which naturally arose in his mind, chiefly during various excursions, undertaken to relieve, at the time, depression of spirits.”

He presents the early sonnets as private feeling prompted by travel rather than as studied literary display · Preface to the Sonnets, ninth edition, 1805

• Feeling
• Melancholy
• Poetry

“I notice the poems we love the best — the poems that really live — have always blood and pulse and heart-warmth in them. There's the thing!”

Living verse, for him, was the verse that still felt warm · Letter to an old friend, 4 March 1883

• Feeling
• Heart
• Poetry

“A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.”

Asks that poetry belong to living rather than sit apart from it · Adagia, notebook aphorisms

• Feeling
• Life
• Poetry

“Were I asked to define poetry, I would answer in a single word, Heart.”

Makes feeling the whole definition of the art · Prefatory notes on poetry

• Feeling
• Heart
• Poetry