My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.