Authors:
  • As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

    "Conrad Aiken, The Art of Poetry No. 9". Interview with Robert Hunter Wilbur in September 1963, "The Paris Review", www.theparisreview.org. Winter - Spring 1968.