Quote of the Day

The urge of poetry is not, of course, to whoop it up for the automobile, the plane, the computer, and the spaceship, but only to bring them and their like into the felt world, where they may be variously taken, and to establish their names in the vocabulary of imagination. One perpetual task of the poet is to produce models of inclusive reaction and to let no word or thing be blackballed by sensibility. That is why I took a large pleasure, some years ago, in bringing off a line which convincingly employed the words “reinforced concrete.”

—Richard Wilbur, “Poetry and Happiness”