• The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.
    Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson (1987). “The Brownings' correspondence”