Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it…. Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art …
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), U.S. philosopher. The Human Condition, ch. 23 (1958).