"My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them"
About this Quote
A poet claiming sovereignty over his own mind is never just doing self-help. Landor frames thought as "company", a social metaphor that turns the interior life into a drawing room: guests arrive, mingle, get screened at the door, and, if necessary, are shown out. The elegance of the phrasing matters. "Bring them together" suggests composition, the poet’s craft of arranging fragments into meaning. "Select them" is taste, a quiet flex against the democratic mess of consciousness. Then the verbs sharpen: "detain", "dismiss". Those are the words of a magistrate or a host with real authority. He isn’t merely observing his mind; he’s staging control.
The subtext is a moral posture as much as a psychological one. In a Romantic era that often celebrated rapture, spontaneity, and the sublime overflow of feeling, Landor champions discipline: self-possession as refinement. It reads like a rebuttal to the idea that inspiration is something that happens to you. Here, the mind is not a storm but an estate.
Context sharpens the stakes. Landor’s life mixed patrician confidence with volatility and exile; he knew both the pleasures of solitude and the costs of temperament. The line functions as an aspirational creed: if the outer world is noisy, political, humiliating, you can still curate an inner republic. That’s why it works. It sells autonomy without pretending the world is benign, and it turns the poet’s most ordinary resource - attention - into a form of power.
The subtext is a moral posture as much as a psychological one. In a Romantic era that often celebrated rapture, spontaneity, and the sublime overflow of feeling, Landor champions discipline: self-possession as refinement. It reads like a rebuttal to the idea that inspiration is something that happens to you. Here, the mind is not a storm but an estate.
Context sharpens the stakes. Landor’s life mixed patrician confidence with volatility and exile; he knew both the pleasures of solitude and the costs of temperament. The line functions as an aspirational creed: if the outer world is noisy, political, humiliating, you can still curate an inner republic. That’s why it works. It sells autonomy without pretending the world is benign, and it turns the poet’s most ordinary resource - attention - into a form of power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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