The reformation of the poet...

From the Poetry Speaks Calendar, 10/11 June.

"[Poetry] aims... at the reformation of the poet, as prayer does. In the grand cases -- as in our century, Yeats and Eliot -- it enables the poet gradually, again and again, to become almost another man; but something of the sort happens, on a small scale, a freeing, with the creation of every real poem."

--John Berryman