And why shouldn't they write poems?

From Migrations to Solitude: The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World  by Sue Halpern, first published 1992 by Pantheon Books:


"... And why shouldn't they write poems? It is symptomatic of how civilized we have become that poetry must now be written by poets. But if poetry is left to the poets, it means that something else, picking apples, say, is left to the apple pickers, and not only don't we get good poems about harvesting apples, we get a society that believes that apple pickers can't write poetry - which is what we have. But not Ned and Mae. They have the society of each other, and they have poems, and they have fresh apples, and no one to tell them they can't."