104 Poet Quotes

In the world of poetry, words have the power to transcend time, stir emotions, and paint vivid pictures in the mind. Poets are the magicians of language, distilling profound truths and delicate feelings into artful verses that resonate with readers across the globe. Whether you're seeking inspiration, solace, or a deeper understanding of the human experience, our curated collection of the top 104 poet quotes is sure to offer a glimpse into the hearts and minds of some of literature’s most revered voices. Join us as we explore these timeless gems, revealing the beauty and complexity of life through the lens of poetry.

1. “To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.” - George Eliot

2. “For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?” - Rainer Maria Rilke

3. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” - Herman Hesse

4. “He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.” - Nora Roberts

5. “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

6. “Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!” - Allen Ginsberg

7. “The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.” - Mary Lascelles

8. “Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.” - Virginia Woolf

9. “I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.” - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

10. “Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.” - Dorianne Laux

11. “You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.” - Dorianne Laux

12. “I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.” - Ian Fleming

13. “A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.” - Bob Dylan

14. “You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

15. “If I had a soul I sold itfor pretty wordsIf I had a body I usedit up spurting my essenceAllen Ginsberg warns youdont follow my pathto extinction” - Allen Ginsberg

16. “And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

17. “When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?” - Alysha Speer

18. “For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.” - Charles Simic

19. “If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I'd probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many dreams. I dreamed of being a great basketball star. I dreamed of being a preacher. I dreamed of saving the world from war and racism. And I dreamed of being a great poet. Today, I dream only of writing.” - Harley King

20. “It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether.” - George Orwell

21. “And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night” - Archibald MacLeish

22. “The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.” - Vladimir Nabokov

23. “Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.” - Rabih Alameddine, (The Hakawati)

24. “In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.” - Aberjhani

25. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde

26. “After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.” - Piet Hein

27. “Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.” - Bhagat Singh

28. “The poet is rather one who inspires than one inspired.” - Paul Eluard

29. “And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.'Is he cursing in rhyme?'He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.'("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")” - William Butler Yeats

30. “Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?” - Neil Gaiman

31. “One's-Self I Sing One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.” - Walt Whitman

32. “All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of the minaret; eternal change, limitless contrast, unending variety.' (Eric Lang)” - Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

33. “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.” - E.B. White

34. “When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.” - Idris SHah

35. “The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.” - L.J. Smith

36. “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.” - Socrates

37. “God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. ” - Socrates

38. “God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods...” - Socrates

39. “Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

40. “There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable.” - Toba Beta

41. “Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,and you're hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny.No - not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air,you suddenly know what you're hoping. ” - Piet Hein

42. “Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,..” - Walt Whitman

43. “I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.” - James Dickey

44. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott

45. “There Are No Believers in This World:There Are Only the Make Believers and the Non-Believers.” - Sharon Esther Lampert

46. “Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!” - Langston Hughes

47. “Live for everything, or die for nothing” - Nate Spears

48. “No thought is a stupid thought, those who are thoughtless are thought of as stupid.” - Nate Spears

49. “Any hand can condem, but it takes a helping hand to build.” - Nate Spears

50. “I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it” - Marianne Moore

51. “When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,...not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.” - Paul E. Miller

52. “ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.” - Melissa Lee-Houghton

53. “I do not write to you, but of you,/because the paper that we write on/is our perishable skin.” - Melissa Lee-Houghton

54. “Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.” - Washington Irving

55. “The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on. He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn't say) that he wasn't a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn't have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar. ("Novelty")” - John Crowley

56. “قلبي في المساءعندما يأتي المساء تسمع صيحات الخفافيش.حصانان أسودان مقيدان في المرعى،القيقب الأحمر يحدث حفيفاً،الشخص الذي يمشي على طول الطريق يرى أمامه حانة صغيرة.البندق والخمر الجديدة لهما طعم لذيذ،لذيذ: ترنح السكران في الغابة الداجية.أجراس القرية، مؤلم سماعها، يتردد صداها عبر أغصانالتنوب السوداء،ندىً يتشكل على الوجه” - Georg Trakl

57. “it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.” - Mary Karr

58. “If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.” - Margaret Atwood

59. “Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.” - Alexander Pope

60. “I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen” - Luke Davies

61. “Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.” - Philip Larkin

62. “There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!” - Philip Larkin

63. “I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.” - Philip Larkin

64. “Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.” - Philip Larkin

65. “Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.” - Criss Jami

66. “When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.” - Criss Jami

67. “This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end” - Heinrich Heine

68. “Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.” - Jeanette Winterson

69. “Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful” - Laura Goode

70. “This one is for our crew, but it’s also for all the weird girls and word nerds, for all the in-the-middle wickeds and queers and misfits and hell-raisers.” - Laura Goode

71. “That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.” - G.K. Chesterton

72. “He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up.” - J.M. Barrie

73. “Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.” - Bertolt Brecht

74. “Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom.” - Michele Brenton

75. “و كان لي حلم زي الناس ..ما مديتشي الخطاوي في سكته الصعبه .. عشان يبقى ..مافضلتش أسير و اشقى ..عشان الحلم يتحقق ..عشان يبقى و انا أبقى ،، فضلت العمر عالطرقة ..و كان بدي أكون ، و بقيت ..لكن غير اللي انا اتمنيت !!و مرقت تحت مني سنيني تسخر مني و تعدي .سحاب ضايع ، لا بيمطر ولا يندي .و انطفى حلمي و نار شبابي الحي ن و اديني عشت ميت حي ، بدال ما اشد عمري .. شدني ، و طواني تحته طَـيّ ..” - عبد الرحمن الأبنودي

76. “To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.” - Richard Hugo

77. “Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.” - Libba Bray

78. “In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.” - Milan Kundera

79. “Intellectuals are rebels, not revolutionaries.” - César Vallejo

80. “The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.” - César Vallejo

81. “Aviation in air, in water and in spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies.” - César Vallejo

82. “Mechanics is a means or discipline for the realization of life, but not life itself. It ought to carry us to life itself.” - César Vallejo

83. “Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.” - Gustave Flaubert

84. “In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.” - R.M. Engelhardt

85. “I have wished you something None of the others would....” - Philip Larkin

86. “There is no good or bad author; there is only one kind of an author, that who connects with the readers.” - Saru Singhal

87. “One does not become a poet by uttering beautiful words. One becomes a poet by pouring their soul as wine into the Cup of Love.” - Subhan Zein

88. “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 the 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

89. “There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.” - Anne Carson

90. “كمن يعود من فردوس مفقود عدتُ من عناقك.‏ كمن يعود من بلد السيوف عدتُ من دموعك.‏ توثبٌ متأخرٌ بقي مثل حلمٍ بين تلك المساءات.‏ ثم رحتُ أُدرك الليالي.‏ والانكسارات.‏” - خورخي لويس بورخيس

91. “The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses” - Arthur Rimbaud

92. “Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's me And who is the poet writing this poem? That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles” - Pierre Albert-Birot

93. “I may not be able to say these words to you but that doesn't mean I can't say it to the rest of the world. I'm not a poet. Nor do I try to be one. I simply share what I do in my spare time. All poetry springs from genuine feelings. I'm only a woman expressing herself to the world.” - Tammy-Louise Wilkins

94. “Poetry lets me pour out my various emotions even the suppressed ones we didn't know exist inside us' til the moment you start jotting down what you're feeling. It's more than an escape into the unknown, a refuge for your creativity and sometimes wild imagination not all ordinary, ungifted people like us understand." -Elizabeth's Quotes” - Elizabeth E. Castillo

95. “...you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?...” - John Geddes

96. “...a bard's down-to-earth love: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red and when she walks, treads on the ground...” - John Geddes

97. “...what else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love?...” - John Geddes

98. “... paint in blue and black...sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...” - John Geddes

99. “For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?” - Matthew Arnold

100. “Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life.” - D.A. Botta

101. “[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)” - Pierre Reverdy

102. “That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.” - George MacDonald

103. “He hoped and feared,' continued Solon, in a low. mournful voice; 'but at times he was very miserable, because he did not think it possible that so much happiness was reserved for him as the love of this beautiful, innocent girl. At night, when he was in bed, and all the world was dreaming, he lay awake looking up at the old books against the walls, thinking how he could bring about the charming of her heart. One night, when he was thinking of this, he suddenly found himself in a beautiful country, where the light did not come from sun or moon or stars, but floated round and over and in everything like the atmosphere. On all sides he heard mysterious melodies sung by strangely musical voices. None of the features of the landscape was definite; yet when he looked on the vague harmonies of colour that melted one into another before his sight he was filled with a sense of inexplicable beauty. On every side of him fluttered radiant bodies, which darted to and fro through the illuminated space. They were not birds, yet they flew like birds; and as each one crossed the path of his vision he felt a strange delight flash through his brain, and straightaway an interior voice seemed to sing beneath the vaulted dome of his temples a verse containing some beautiful thought. Little fairies were all this time dancing and fluttering around him, perching on his head, on his shoulders, or balancing themselves on his fingertips. 'Where am I?' he asked. 'Ah, Solon?' he heard them whisper, in tones that sounded like the distant tinkling of silver bells, "this land is nameless; but those who tread its soil, and breathe its air, and gaze on its floating sparks of light, are poets forevermore.' Having said this, they vanished, and with them the beautiful indefinite land, and the flashing lights, and the illumined air; and the hunchback found himself again in bed, with the moonlight quivering on the floor, and the dusty books on their shelves, grim and mouldy as ever.'("The Wondersmith")” - Fitz-James O'Brien

104. “He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal.” - S. T. Coleridge