The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.