“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
On Milton (1825)
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay 101
British historian and Whig politician 1800–1859Related quotes
On how certain poetry intermingles popular culture in “Q & A: AMERICAN POETRY—Francisco Aragón” https://poetrysociety.org/features/q-a-american-poetry-1/francisco-arag%C3%B3n (Poetry Society of America)
“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”
Andrew R. MacAndrew (trans.) A Precocious Autobiography (1963; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 7.
Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise
“Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves.”
The Poet and the World (1996)
Context: Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.
“I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.”
Book III, Chapter 3, p. 361
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”
Source: Dear Life: Stories
"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews