Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Adamson

The line has the offhand candor of someone trying to praise genius while keeping one eye on the wreckage genius can leave behind. Adamson starts with clinical understatement - "certainly in a confused state" - then immediately grounds it in the ordinary ritual of "go and visit him", as if mental collapse is just another appointment on the calendar. The mention of Callan Park (an asylum setting) quietly does the heavy lifting: whatever literary scene these poets belonged to, it ran alongside institutional corridors and locked doors.

Calling them "the best poets" is real admiration, but it arrives wrapped in a bleak appraisal of outcomes. The repetition and hesitation ("They were really - to me they were") reads like someone correcting himself mid-sentence, aware that declaring greatness is easy; defending it in a culture that measures worth by momentum and recognition is harder. That stammering syntax mirrors the moral discomfort underneath: how do you celebrate artistry when the artists are being swallowed by illness, poverty, obscurity, or all three?

The final tag - "they weren't getting far were they?" - lands as a rhetorical question that isn't asking. It's a verdict on a system that can recognize talent and still let it languish, but it's also self-indicting: the speaker is part of the world that visits, observes, praises, and then returns home. As a philosopher, Adamson isn't offering a theory; he's exposing the lived contradiction between aesthetic judgment and social reality. Greatness, he suggests, doesn't automatically convert into a viable life, and the culture that loves poets often treats their survival as optional.