“With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”– Edgar Allan Poe Related Quotes “Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.”– John Betjeman “Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”– John Keats “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.”– Robert Hass