On Literature: On Poets (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be appreciated by the statistician or the poet." (Edward M Forster, "Howards End", 1910)

"To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths." (George Barker,"Therefore All Poems Are Elegies", 1940)

"You know how one feels about history, the glamour of the past; I expected to hear everybody talking about great events - battles, poets, that kind of thing - but of course you don’t. You just squabble among yourselves." (Gore Vidal, "Visit to a Small Planet", [revised, play] 1957)

"I might well retort that many men on Earth have had the presentiment of a! superior being who may one day succeed them but that no scientist, philosopher, or poet  has ever imagined this superhuman in the guise of an ape." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"Love is not, as some poets say, a raging brush fire, but a hearthfire, which burns hotly, it is true, but in order to warm the cold sea-caves of the heart and light its pools with anemones of radiance." (Thomas B Swann, "Day of the Minotaur", 1966)

"Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet’s eyes and recounted in a poet’s terms." (Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom, "The Jesus Incident", 1979)

"If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters." (Bruce Sterling, "Burning Chrome", [preface] 1986)

"People who plan roads, bridges, sewers, and so forth are called civil engineers. Civilization happens in cities, where civil society is possible, because of civil engineers. Cities are fed by roads, drained by sewers, watered by pipes that they lay down. There have been barbarian poets and composers, even painters and some lawyers, but never a barbarian civil engineer. You have to be civilized to care about roads." (John Barnes, "My Advice to the Civilized", 1990)

"People reach their peak ability as military commanders much earlier than we thought. Most of them in their late teens. The same age when poets do their most passionate and revolutionary work. And mathematicians. They peak, and then it falls off. They coast on what they learned back when they were still young enough to learn." (Orson Scott Card, "First Meetings in Ender's Universe", 2002)