‘THE rise, the setting of imagery, should, like the sun, come natural to him’ (the reader), ‘shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.’—KEATS, Letters.
‘… those ornaments can be allowed that conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to the completion of the work.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
(After a comparison of poetry to a ship, and poets to a mariner) ‘…some, to goe the lighter away, will take in their fraught of spangled feathers, golden Peebles, Straw, Reedes, Bulrushes or anything, and then they heave out their sayles as proudly as if they were balisted with Bulbeefe.’—THOMAS NASHE, Preface to the first quarto edition (1591) of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella.