it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you're being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself've been singled out and chosen by the moment.

poetry ... you, all of you, ignore it. What the dead poet said, you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes you in

Philosophers, artists, and poets must help decide whether it is permissible to use chemicals in farming ... [to preserve the] essential dramas of nature

When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry – and often find it too – whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.

As if a theory of writing poetry is useful whereas the poem is not

a Latin Sabine or Etruscan mother
Who didn't have the time, chance, education or notion
To write some poetry so I could know
What she thought about things

I'd like to know
What kind of person I must be to be a poet

You don't have to be a poet to be prone to apophenia, to seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday.

I am shy around poetry; I feel often as though it is reading me more than I am reading it.

Well, because I don't write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

Inside all of B.B.'s books appeared the quotation copied from a tombstone in a north-country churchyard by his father:

The wonder of the world
The beauty and the power,
The shapes of things,
Their colours, lights and shades,
These I saw.
Look ye also while life lasts.

"I suppose that's why Plato would not have allowed poets into his Republic. They are, inevitably, disturbed and disturbing people, vulnerable, anarchic, never quite grown up, feeling their way by hunches, in touch at times with mysterious powers, always engaged in knocking walls down, opening locked doors, and making nuisances of themselves" (Andrew Lightfoot in The Poet and the Donkey)

The Poet by James Kirkup

Each instant of his life, a task, he never rests,
And works most when he appears to be doing nothing.
The least of it is putting down in words
What usually remains unwritten and unspoken,
And would so often be much better left
Unsaid, for it is really the unspeakable
That he must try to give an ordinary tongue to.

And if, by art and accident,
He utters the unutterable, then
It must appear as natural as a breath,
Yet be an inspiration. And he must go,
The lonelier for his unwanted miracle,
His singular way, a gentle lunatic at large
In the societies of cross and reasonable men.

Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the "sacred"

(letter from Eugénie)

We live our daily lives in a constant exchange with the set of daily appearances surrounding us—often they are very familiar, sometimes they are unexpected and new, but always they confirm our lives. [It] can happen, suddenly, unexpectedly, and most frequently in the half-light-of-glimpses, that we catch sight of another visible order which intersects with ours and has nothing to do with it.