Who, being loved, is poor?

If Poverty be a Title to Poetry, I am sure nobody can dispute mine. I own myself of the Company of Beggars; and I make one at their Weekly Festivals at St. Giles's. I have a small Yearly Salary for my Catches, and am welcome to a Dinner there whenever I please, which is more than most Poets can say.

I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor.

Everything belongs to me because I am poor.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

I have the grace of providence to be poor.

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

I couldn’t avoid being a poet. I was really having a pretty rough time of things, and I had a lot of energy, and poems were practically the only recourse I had to alleviate that energy and that anxiety. I take no credit for all the poems I’ve written. They were a way of releasing anxiety.

We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and — our former riches.

You’re coming with me, poor thing. You don’t know how to listen. You don’t know how to speak. You don’t know how to sing. I will teach you.” I followed poetry.

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

Raised in a working-class, immigrant family, I didn’t have access to poetry. I want to write poetry that my mother can read, or poetry that I would have loved as a little boy. I think of myself as a poet of the people. I argue against the idea that if a poem is accessible, it’s not complex. Accessible is not synonymous with simple.

The poor,” I said, “are very creative. They know how to earn a living and how to change their lives.

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are.