I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.

I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".