Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer Above the Mists (1818)

"[A poet] is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind."--William Wordsworth, Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."--Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

From my youth upwards

My spirit walked not with the souls of men,

Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;

The thirst of their ambition was not mine,

The aim of their existence was not mine; . . .

For if the beings of whom I was one,--

Hating to be so,--crossed me in my path,

I felt myself degraded back to them,

And was all clay again.

--Byron, Manfred

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