"It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments,
to find the words that will unlock the doors
of all those many mansions inside the head
and express something
perhaps not much, just something
of the crush of information that presses in on us
from the way a crow flies over
and the way a man walks
and the look of a street
and from what we did one day a dozen years ago.
Words that will express something of the deep complexity
that makes us precisely the way we are,
from the momentary effect of the barometer
to the force that created men distinct from trees
and in that same moment,
make out of it all the vital signature of a human being
not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram,
or of a heap of lenses but a human being,
we call it poetry."
Ted Hughes
The longer I live,
the more I see there's something about reciting rhythmical words aloud
it's almost biological
that comforts and enlivens human beings.
Robert Pinsky
