Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

Once upon a midnight dreary

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.