Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. – Laura Riding
The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself. – Laura Riding
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. – Laura Riding
Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Progress of Culture”