“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”– W. H. Auden Related Quotes “A lot happens by accident in poetry.”– Howard Nemerov “I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.”– Kenneth Koch “The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.”– William Shenstone