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 would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.

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.

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

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