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A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard

Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off. ~Philip Larkin

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~Carl Sandburg

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats

Choose one of the following statements about poetry (or find your own) to refute or support, and in the process, write a poem explaining why you write poems.

Above all, avoid being trite.