“I read poetry to save time.”

“The terrible poetry of human nudity, I understand it at last, I who tremble for the first time in trying to read it with blasé eyes.”

“Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.”

“As if bad poetry could ever save anyone.”

“What is poetry which does not save nations or people?”

“I don't have a poetry section in the bookshop.(Don't have but should have, I have begun to think. The poetry, like everything else, is scattered thematically in a generally successful attempt to encourage punters to walk the circle, reading shelves which, if more conventionally arranged, they might feel happy to skip. But poetry - unlike fiction, biography, drama, history - continues to be generically in demand. It's not a question, as I used to assume, of no one reading poetry; more a matter of people who read poetry liking little else. They need a Section.)”