"Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associa… - Dana Gioia

“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas” (29).

"The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable" (27).

Poetry is not a branch of analytical philosophy. It is a primal, holistic kind of human communication. A poet needs innocence as much as knowledge, emotion as much as intelligence, vulnerability as much as rigor. A poet can become too smart for his or her own good and forget the childlike pleasures of sound and story, sense, and sensuality that poetry should provide. The challenge for a writer is to master the medium of poetry without losing that inner innocence.