Remembrance makes the poet; 'tis the past
Lingering within him, with a keener sense
Than is upon the thoughts of common men
Of what has been, that fills the actual world
With unreal likenesses of lovely shapes,
That were and are not; and the fairer they,
The more their contrast with existing things,
The more his power, the greater is his grief.

The past is the poet's,—that world is his own;
Thence hath his music its truth and its tone.
He calls up the shadows of ages long fled,
And light, as life lovely, illumines the dead.

I go to my past in order to discern the future.

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.

One faces the future with one's past.

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

The past is more than a memory.