I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.

I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that my versions are explorations.

I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.