The impulse to create is pure, self sufficient, its own reward or punishment. - Vernon Scannell

The genuinely innovatory , the truly 'experiential' poetry is always firmly rooted in the achievement of the past.

You can find out far more about a writer from his poems or fiction ..because in his stories or poems, his preoccupations, obsessions, moral standards, the quality of his intelligence, his loves, hates, aspirations, belief and fears.. insist on expression.

It is impossible for a poet to fashion the voice deliberately by contrivance and experiment; it could not be discovered or simulated through the cultivation of an eccentric diction or prosody, or by the employment of regional speech rhythms and patterns.