Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?

A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high,…

I play. But this is what I think.

What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic an…

There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life:It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its cle…

Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaningof a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'