Nothing truly convincing – which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill – has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry. – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The poetry of a given age teaches us less what it has, than what it wants and what it loves. It is a living medal, where the concavities in the die are transformed into convexities on the bronze or gold. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. – Countee Cullen (1903–1946)

Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers