“Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Yuanchong Xu (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), p. 54”

“Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

““Recent Poetry”, p. 226”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The song is heroic because the song confronts death. The song is immortal and bravely stares down our own extinction. The song emerges from the spirit world with a true message: Some day I will tell you how to slay the dragon.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

“Anyone with a good classical education could learn Chinese by himself without difficulty.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

“By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell and I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime.”

John Nash (1928–2015) American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate

“My Autobiography, New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1928. Reprinted in Benito Mussolini, My Rise And Fall, Volumes 1-2 Da Capo Press, 1998 (p.40).”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

“The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

“True poetry was never speech, but always song.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art