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A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

John Keats

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John Keats
Age: 25 †
Born: 1795
Born: October 31
Died: 1821
Died: February 23
Judge-Rapporteur
Physician
Poet
Star
Polar
Poetry
Sails
Imagination
Sail
Stars
Poem
Take
Fancy
Long
Test
Invention
Rudder
Tests
Rudders

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A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.
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How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they
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Call the world if you please the vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world.
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O let me lead her gently o'er the brook, Watch her half-smiling lips and downward look O let me for one moment touch her wrist Let me one moment to her breathing list And as she leaves me, may she often turn Her fair eyes looking through her locks auburne.
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Let us away, my love, with happy speed There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see, - Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead. Awake! arise! my love and fearless be, For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.
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Feeling well that breathed words Would all be lost, unheard, and vain as swords Against the enchased crocodile, or leaps Of grasshoppers against the sun.
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A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.
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I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
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To stay youthful, stay useful.
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O, sorrow! Why dost borrow Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?
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I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of I am, however young, writing at random straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?
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I would jump down Etna for any public good - but I hate a mawkish popularity.
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I will clamber through the clouds and exist.
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I love your hills and I love your dales, And I love your flocks a-bleating but oh, on the heather to lie together, With both our hearts a-beating!
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As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden,- Speech is silvern, Silence is golden or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
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No one can usurp the heights... But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.
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Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
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Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine?
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A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
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it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
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