Lu

"Poetry is common to all people, with youth it speaks of love, with parents it speaks of families, with older people it speaks of the past. People may do as they please. Whether or not a revolution comes to overturn rotten societies, or change that merely alters them a little bit, whatever political changes may or may not take place, there will still be youngsters, there will still be mothers, there will still be old men; in short, there will still be people who know love, who know happiness, who know pain. Poetry is for them... The human heart is...always the human heart.
It is not that we are unaware of the urgent duties of the times, that we are unaware of the pressing demands of a new life. It is not that we do not realize that the responsibility of writers today is heavy, is perilous, and to be [met] properly must serve the majority, serve the masses. But we also know that beyond the literature of struggle, the literature of a period, there is also a literature that is enternal.
We cannot for any reason neglect the following point. The literature that is etnernal takes the human heart at its base... In truth it has no East, no West, no modernity, no antiquity. It has a perpetual essence, like times, because it comes from the human heart, a human heart that remains unchanged through the ages."
Luu Trong Lu
March 9, 1998