Mahmoud Darwish
"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."

"The Prison Cell"

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers.
“What did you do with the walls?”
“I gave them back to the rocks.”
“And what did you do with the ceiling?”
“I turned it into a saddle.”
“And your chain?”
“I turned it into a pencil.”

"All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful."

Wilfred Owen

"Septimus was one of the first to volunteer.  He went to France to
save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's
plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square...
Here he opened Shakespeare once more.  That boy's business of the
intoxication of language--Antony and Cleopatra--had shrivelled
utterly.  How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of
clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and
the belly!  This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden
in the beauty of words.  The secret signal which one generation
passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.
Dante the same.  Aeschylus (translated) the same.
(From Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway)