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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 is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.

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

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.