With walking sick, with curtseys lame, and frighted by the scolding dame, poor Mira once again is seen within the bounds of Goslin-Green. - Mary Leapor 'The Visit'

Poetry is the most elemental of the written arts.

'No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.' Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

All things within this fading world hath end. ('Before the Birth of One of Her Children')

As activities, writing poetry and climbing have few connections, apart from a heightened sense of being and awareness, of being fully engaged. Andrew Greig

Forget the corny comedian: Pam Ayres is a proper poet, whose wistful, funny, and perceptive verse captures both the joy and unfairness of life. - Sunday Times

I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. - Maxine Kumin

C. K. Williams is a wonderful poet, in the authentic American tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, who tells us on every page what it means to be alive in our time. - Stanley Kunitz

The blood jet is poetry,/ There is no stopping it. - 'Kindness', Sylvia Plath (written 1st February 1963)

The kind of poetry that excites me is the kind that comes closest to direct communication, the kind of communication that one can sometimes feel without words in a look or a gesture. - Edwin Brock

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders - Seamus Heaney