There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author’s voice which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as it has received existence, acts independently of the master’s impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates what they do and say. Such creation is poetry in the literal sense of the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing fullness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its nature.
Niebuhr (Letters, &c., Vol. III, 196).
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but, when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Shelley (A Defence of Poetry).
Who would loose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,