[http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9049584/al-Maarri Profile in Encyclopædia Britannica]

[http://www.humanistictexts.org/al_ma'arri.htm Al-Maʿarri's poems (in English)]

M. R. Kale, [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53790/page/n235/mode/2up Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava Cantos I-VII] (Bombay: Standard Publishing Co., 1917)

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)

The most excellent of modern poets, ... whom I reverence next to Virgil.

In the whole world of Greek antiquity there is no poetical representation of beautiful love which approaches even afar.

Attar has roamed through the seven cities of love while we have barely turned down the first street.

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

Even if you have three or four extra syllables—or as many as five or seven—you need not worry as long as the verse sounds right.

Khusrau “was one of the first to offer his congratulations to the murderer whose hands were still red with the blood of his king, his uncle and his benefactor… The poet changed with changing time and turned with shifting wind.”

It is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ho-xuan-huong Ho Xuan Huong] at the Poetry Foundation

I am lucky not to have such bad habits. I only indulge myself in drinking wine and writing poetry. I am indeed indulgent, but what harm will that do?

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/zamora.html PBS poetry everywhere video]

When you explain poetry, it becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it.