Writing - Descriptive passages

In writing, we are attempting to entertain and we have many strategies available to us to use. I have already related how much reading means to me and has done for many years. An early positive reading experience for me was reading the early part of Great Expectations by Dickens. His description of the misty marsh, the prison ship and Abel Magwitch, was magnificent. I have read many other such stories with great descriptive passages and one such section in 250 - 300 pages can influence your whole feeling about a story. So when you are describing something, a little extra thought may help. 

I am currently reading Stephen Fry's book The Hippopotamus. In the story, I've just come across a passage where he describes the difficulties of being a poet. I have included that passage below.

The poet, though. Oh, yes, the poor poet: pity the poor bloody poet. The poet has no reserved materials, no unique modes. He has noth- ing but words, the same tools that the whole cursed world uses to ask the way to the nearest lavatory, or with which they patter out excuses for the clumsy betrayals and shiftless evasions of their ordinary lives; the poet has nothing but the same, self-same, words that daily in a million shapes and phrases curse, pray, abuse, flatter and mislead. The poor bloody poet can no longer say 'ope' for 'open', or 'swain' for 'youth', he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social inter- course. 

As always a forthright opinion well expressed by Stephen Fry but to illustrate the importance of description the essence of the feeling expressed sticks with the reader. 

God Bless