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.

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

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.

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.

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

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.