Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its best expression is through poetry. Therefore, poetry should not try to do the stuff that mere prose does: convey information or make arguments about ideas.