Sublime

“Ross Wilcox’s a prat, not a poet. But if you’re going to suggest that I write a poem to Dawn Madden, no way. I’d be the village laughingstock.” “Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her ‘prat’ and you will justly earn derision. But if a poem is beauty and truth, your Miss Madden will treas

As famed author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note the features of the scene or commemorate some hal

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic."

John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”

He saw all this because he was a poet, though in practice a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.