Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people.

Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.

As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.

The guests are met, the feast is set:May'st hear the merry din.

A savage place! as holy and enchantedAs e'er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover!

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

The man hath penance done,And penance more will do.

It is an ancient Mariner,And he stoppeth one of three."By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?"

Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay!—and what then?

A damsel with a dulcimerIn a vision once I saw:It was an Abyssinian maid,And on her dulcimer she played,Singing of Mount Abora.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole.

For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

O it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please.

The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors two, facility to acquirers and three, hope to all.

A poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry.

The ice was here, the ice was there,The ice was all around:It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,Like noises in a swound!

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.

An orphan's curse would drag to HellA spirit from on highBut oh More horrible than thatIs the curse in a dead man's eye.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius-- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.