Monday Morning Quote: Jeanette Winterson on The Consoling Power of Poetry

So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

—Jeanette Winterson, in "Shafts of Sunlight, in The Guardian