In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988, Annie Dillard (1945–2026) wrote:

Poetry seems to have priced itself out of a job; sadly, it often handles few materials of significance and addresses a tiny audience.

In their essay "Poetry As Necessary Imagination," Cody-Rose Clevidence (1984–), wrote:

Rothenberg, later in his introduction to Technicians of the Sacred writes,"The poems themselves revealed . . . that poetry, like language itself, existed everywhere: as powerful, even complex, in its presumed beginnings as in many of its later works. In the light of that approach, poetry appeared not as a luxury but as a true necessity: not a small corner of the world for those who lived it but equal to the world itself."
        It seems to me that there is, in every discipline, a small faction of people who think there is one right way to do things, constrained by just the very narrow time in which they themselves learned to do those things, perhaps from another person who likewise believed there was one way to do things, a sort of string of gullible people in rooms. Maybe these people are particularly good at getting and holding academic jobs, or finding funding for their journals, or writing their Elements of Style. They probably know the right people, and maybe even believe there is such a thing as "the right people to know." That’s fine. I think we should let them, with a sort of twinkle in our eye that even a crow would recognize, and why not, the harm they do isn’t a great harm because the whole rest of the world is out here and easily discoverable, waiting, excited, even, and just full up of all of everyone else, sharing interesting things between each other, doing our little joyful exploring, refining, inventing and tinkering, seeing what else we can do, bigger louder, smaller, more beautiful, further, because that is what humans like to do, because we are having fun, because we always have, and because we can’t not.

In his essay "On 'As For Poets'" in Turtle Island, Gary Snyder (1930–) wrote:

Who can get outside the universe? But the poem was born elsewhere, and need not stay. Like the wild geese of the Arctic, it heads home, far above the borders, where most things cannot cross.
        Now we are both in, and outside, the world at once. The only place this can be is the Mind. Ah, what a poem. It is what is, completely, in the past, present, and future simultaneously, seeing being, and being seen.
        Can we really do this? But we do. So we sing. Poetry is for all men and women. The power within—the more you give, the more you have to give—will still be our source when coal and oil are long gone, and atoms are left to spin in peace.