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The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

— George Henry Lewes The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

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Poetry

More quotes by George Henry Lewes

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.

The Spanish Drama (1846)

The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

The Foundations of a Creed (1874)

Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.

The Foundations of a Creed (1874)

We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.

The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature.

All George Henry Lewes quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Henry Lewes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.