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

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.

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

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

I hardly ever look at my published books.

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.