Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Seamus Heaney
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the... →
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.