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As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.