Occasionally,in the broad curent of contemporary poetry and of writing about it,it seems as though an essential element of the condition of poetry-overflowing in its origin,I believe,and crucial to its survival-is in danger of being overlooked. It is the fact that poetry begins with pleasure(with "delight," Sir Philip Sidney says),
and if it continues as poetry in our time,our memories,our minds,it does so as pleasure. The uneasy certainty that
this is so has led the recurring waves of puritanism which our species has evolved in one repressive ideology after another(including the bottom-line puritanism of the modern world,with its gross devotion) to disparage or outlaw poetry as an undesirable and potentially hazardous substance,unprofitable and likely to encourage the notion that truth and pleasure might somewhere be related...

W.S. Merwin
Foreword to "Shells" by
Craig Arnold