Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.
Poetry is the disease of the brain.
I really love the idea of the poetically mad - the character that is imbued with the romantic madness. Like River from 'Firefly' or Drusilla from 'Buffy.' Someone dangerously unhinged, where you're really not sure they're going to be reliable minute-to-minute.
Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.
Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.
If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.
