W.H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.