I will not be a slave to my yesterday. I am creator, not a parrot. - Vachel Lindsay

There were three great Virginia poets in the very beginning — George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson. “What!” you say. “We do not even know the names of their publishers. They were not poets!” Well, how do you know? Did you ever really read them? What do you know about it? Their very names will breathe poetry forever.

I have sung my songs to my own tunes for most of the English departments of the state universities of the forty-eight states of the nation, and the English departments of other universities and colleges; and I have been recalled to many of these seven and eight times, which matters are a source of great pride to me. And I have brought out three books where the songs were based on my own pen-and-ink pictures.

Poetry is for the inner ear