"Much of what follows may well seem conventional, classical, school-teacherly. I make no apologies for this. My aim isn't to break new ground in the anthologising of poetry, nor to discover and present the previously unknown. My aim is simply to gather some of the many poems I have loved, and to describe how they've worked in me as the culture for my own growth. Nor am I concerned to present 'poets' - those incidental mouthpieces of the poetic spirit, with their mundane biographies and their interfering egos: though perhaps, sometimes, a particular event may require comment insofar as it helps elucidate the otherwise obscure. Poetry is a process of language and technique, through which the poetic spirit may be animated. The love of poetry is the love of that spirit, and the desire for symbiosis."