I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. - Seamus Heaney

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

No trembling harp, no tuned timber, no tumbling hawk swerving through the hall, no swift horse pawing the courtyard. Pillage and slaughter have emptied the earth of entire peoples. And so he mourned as he moved about the world, deserted and alone, lamenting his unhappiness day and night, until death's flood brimmed up in his heart.

The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague's words, is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read.