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

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

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

An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.

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

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.

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