“All poets are mad.”

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

“To be a poet is to dive into the madness of poetry and penetrate deeply into the realm of words…”

Valter Bitencourt Júnior (1994) Brazilian poet and writer

“For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) English poet

“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

“In Russia - Poets are considered a danger to the political system and are sent into Asylums.
What a compliment to the Russian People
that poetry could move them so.
In NZ Poets are not considered a danger.
No one reads poetry
Poets aren't sent to Asylums but they are considered mad nonetheless”

Tim Shadbolt (1947) New Zealand politician

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

“We're all mad here. Im mad. You're mad”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”

William H. Gass (1924–2017) Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor