One woman’s battle to bring poetry back into everyday life to help improve the world. Sigh. I love you hopeless heroes. I mean, I really do.

Going to a library to listen to an actor read poems is not, she insists, an act of self-improvement. “It’s allowing yourself to stop depriving yourself of what is incandescently beautiful in life. To deny yourself that is voluntarily to starve your soul. And if your soul is starved it is impossible to be happy. Modern life makes it hard for people to feed their souls, and that’s what people find there. They’re on a starvation diet and they come out and they suddenly think: ‘My god! This is a feast!’

“After all, what is it that makes us human? It is language. And poetic language is the most rare form. It’s like a gem because the wisdom and insight of the poet is compressed into it. It’s a thrilling thing that a line can set off in your mind a whole world of potential experience. Either it inspires you in terms of wanting certain experiences, or it can help you to treasure the experience within those lines. And therefore life, for the short time we’re on this Earth, is immensely enriched.”