Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

One does not become a guru by accident.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

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.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

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.