Revolutions in aesthetic sensibility may be the only way in which radical change can be brought about in the future… It may be only from aesthetic changes of one sort or another that one can expect a radical shift in the people’s consciousness.
“I imagine that before I had read any modern poetry I had the same inhibition about reading poetry that most people have all the time. They say, ‘I don’t know how to appreciate this, it’s something that I don’t know anything about.’ There is the feeling that you have to take some kind of course before you can understand a poem which I think prevents people from reading poetry. They think that you cannot simply open a book of poems, start reading and instantly enjoy it. I discovered later on that wasn’t true.”
John Ashbery