Poets

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

In 1817, the poet John Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching ... See more

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

∆ Hart Crane, from a letter quoted in Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet by Philip Horton (Norton, 1937)