ultimately language alone cannot liberate us - Adrienne Rich

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. (2001)

For a very long time, poems were a way of talking about what I couldn't talk about any other way. And why is it that you're not able to talk about certain things? It's because they are the points of danger, you feel that in the social fabric, you feel there are people who don't want you to raise this question, or if you're a child-to ask this question. That is the threatening place, and of course it becomes a place of great fascination too. I was equipped from a very young age to use language in this way because of how I was brought up, and by whom I was brought up, and the fact that poetry was available to me as a choice, when it might not have been for another seven or ten years if I'd been another child.

I drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. (1997)