God is the perfect poet. ~ Robert Browning
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~ Joseph Joubert
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~ Edith Sodergran
Poetry is what gets lost in the translation. ~ Robert Frost
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~ W.B. Yeats
A poem should not mean
But be.
~ Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926
Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
~ Muriel Rukeyser
Who can tell the dancer from the dance? ~ W.B. Yeats
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie --
True Poems flee.
~ Emily Dickinson
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~ Novalis
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~ Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. Dead Poets' Society
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? ~ W. H. Auden
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie
Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off. ~ Philip Larkin
~ or whatever that fellar caterpillar would be called.
! Bookworm, of course 
! The legless caterpillar 
.
. I didn't mention it before, but since you mentioned "bemused bookworm" again, Smokey, I will now.