I would say that the poem exists in a space somewhere between the reader and the author, and in a sense belongs to neither, and both. - Don Paterson

...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

Poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods. - Ted Hughes

What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. - Galway Kinnell

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

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

A true poem is dreamed and danced as well as thought. - Les Murray