Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme