What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.