Book Quote by Miguel de Cervantes

[To] turn poet, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

— Miguel de Cervantes

“What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

— Felix Dennis

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

— Randall Jarrell

Poetry can cause irreparable harm when misapplied

— Gail Carriger

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

— Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint.

— Washington Irving

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.

— William Shenstone

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

— Paul Valery

I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.

— Ogden Nash

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

— Victor Hugo

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur…

— David Lehman