To Edward Lear on his travels in Greece, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Ah Tennyson, most famous for The Charge of the Light Brigade/In Memoriam, at one time Englands Poet Laureate. We studied him in school and the poems did nothing for me, too old, too many references to things that I didn’t get. Now that I’m older and much better read his poetry makes sense.
Is that a good or a bad thing?

Here’s To Edward Lear on his travels in Greece. Come for the imagery, stay for the cadence.
Enjoy

Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,

Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there:

And trust me while I turn’d the page,
And track’d you still on classic ground,
I grew in gladness till I found
My spirits in the golden age.

For me the torrent ever pour’d
And glisten’d — here and there alone
The broad-limb’d gods at random thrown
By fountain urns; — and Naiads oar’d

A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell;
And many a slope was rich in bloom

From him that on the mountain lea
By dancing rivulets fed his flocks,
To him who sat upon the rocks,
And fluted to the morning sea.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Throwing your work away, Orson Scott Card.

Orson Scott Card. Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards two years in a row, back when that actually meant something. His book, How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy is a great primer for anyone interested in the field, and well worth picking up if you get the chance. Although I’m a big fan of everyone doing their own thing when it comes to writing, there being no one way of getting your story out there, Card makes a great case for letting an idea sit in the back of your mind and ferment until you’re ready to use it, along with the associated ideas that they pick up like cat hairs on a black suit.

All but a handful of my stories have come from combining two completely unrelated ideas that have been following their own tracks through my imagination. And all the stories I was still proud of six months after writing them have come from ideas that ripened for many months—usually years—between the time I first thought of them and the time they were ready to put into a story. “Great,” you say. “I pick up this book, hoping to learn how to write speculative fiction, and now this guy’s telling me that I have to wait months or years before writing stories about any new ideas I think of.” That’s what I’m telling you: You’ll probably have to wait months or years before writing good versions of story ideas you come up with now. But you probably already have hundreds of story ideas that have been ripening inside you for many years. For some writers, one of the best ways to help an idea ripen is to try writing a draft of it, seeing what comes up when you actually try to make it into a story. As long as you recognize that the draft you write immediately after thinking of the idea will almost certainly have to be thrown away and rewritten from the beginning, you’ll be fine.

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Genre Writing Book 2)