“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”– T. S. Eliot Related Quotes “As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.”– T. S. Eliot “Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”– Archibald MacLeish “The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.”– Seamus Heaney