Inspiration can come from the most unlikely sources.
Lila was after me about creating a “mission 
statement” for Hartshorn Studios and I was avoiding it because it felt like old business school blah blah.
Then I was drifting through an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe’s works and came upon this description of Poe’ philosophy….and I was transfixed….here were the words that spoke not only to me, but for me. And suddenly mission statements made sense:
Note: interchange “art” and “artist” for “poetry” and “poet”.
“The poet’s right – in fact, his duty – is 
to dream, to provide a place, a habitat, for the goddesses, the dryads, the naiads, the Elfin, and thereby conduct the reader to a realm of Beauty. To present Beauty for its own sake, without other justification. To take us to a sphere of loveliness. For Poe, this was, one might say, a religion: he felt that there is a realm of being beyond the worldly domain in which we prosaically live: and that poetry is the means by which we can momentarily reach it. It is through the poem, or through the music that eternity could be glimpsed”. Wilber S. Scott on Edgar Allan Poe
