the likes of him

“1845-1847 - Quoil’s Deserted House”:

He was here, the likes of him, for a season, standing light in his shoes like a faded gentleman, with gesture almost learned in drawing-rooms; wore clothes, hat, shoes, cut ditches, felled wood, did farm work for various people, kindled fires, worked enough, ate enough, drank too much. He was one of those unnamed, countless sects of philosophers who founded no school.

"The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Houghton Mifflin & Co.,1906). Journal VIII edited by Bradford Torrey [The small and much mutilated journal which begins here appears to belong to the Walden period (1845-1847), but the entries are undated.]

community of objectives

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

—Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (Yale Univ. Press, 2012)

solo voice

All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy.

John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” The Crayon, vol. 7, no. 4, 1860.