I Think That The Job Of Poetry,

Poetry, When It Takes Sides, When It Proposes Solutions, Isn't Any Smarter Than Anybody Else.

I Think That The Job Of Poetry, Its Political Job, Is To Refresh The Idea Of Justice, Which Is Going Dead In Us All The Time.

One Of The Interesting Things About The History Of Poetry In The 16th, 17th, And 18th Centuries Is That People Who Read Liked Getting Their Information In Rhyme Just As Much As In Prose. The Genre That We Would Think Of As Nonfiction Often Was Written In Verse In Forms Like The Georgic When People Thought That One Of The Tasks Of Poetry Was Conveying Arguments And Information In A Pleasant Way.

Milton Was The First Person Who Really Experimented With Putting Politics Into Sonnets.

It Seems Like Every Ten Years There's A Book That Says That Poetry Used To Be Popular, And Now It's Not, But We Really Have No Way Of Knowing, In Terms Of Relative Size Of Audience And Other Things, Exactly Who Readers Were.