It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.