To see the Summer Sky / Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie? / True Poems flee?

...the communication of the dead/is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. - from Part 1 of 'Little Gidding', T. S. Eliot

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems. - Larkin to his publisher

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

You cannot fake anything if you are trying to write serious poetry. - Elizabeth Jennings

...if poetry is a method of approaching truths, and each of us with a human soul and 'a tongue in oor heids' can make an approach toward a truth, poetry is inherently democratic. - Kathleen Jamie

Young or old / What was I but the story told / By an unageing one? (Kathleen Raine, from 'Ah, many, many are the dead...')