Quotes on Poets

“[Poetry] is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives” – Wallace Stevens

“Art has always been a communication protocol to restore the human experience beyond oppression, difference and conflict. The paintings of the powerful, in their human misery, the sculpting of the oppressed in their human dignity, the bridges between the beauty of our environment and the inner hells of our psyche…[these] are all media to go beyond the inescapable labours of life, to find the expression of joy, of pain, of feeling that reunites us, and makes this planet liveable after all” - Manuel Castells

“Poetry [vs prose] can be recognised by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form; it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically… The poet is deprived of the immense advantages possessed by the musician” [to create an imagined universe] – Paul Valery

“To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the traces of the fugitive gods” – Martin Heidegger