Almost all my poetry comes out of a sense of wonder at the sheer materiality of the world; and of bewilderment about how we know what we know. - Brook Emery

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. - 'Locksley Hall', Alfred Tennyson

The writer today should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community...as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct. - Louis MacNeice