“Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.  Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.  Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.  Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues.  A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.”

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

“Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses.”

“The greatness of poetry comes from its struggle to express the rapture of the soul in the contemplation of beauty.”

“There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.”