There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Poetry is a necessity of life.

There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.