“I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won’t live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.”
“A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.”
“I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn’t mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.”
“Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.”
“Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.”
“I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.”
“I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.”
“I don’t like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.”
“I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life – though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.”
“I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.”
“I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.”
“I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.”
“I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.”
“I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.”
“I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn’t otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.”
“I’m not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word’s meaning, or multiple meanings.”
“My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.”
“Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister – who is a children’s writer married to a poet.”
“Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.”
“Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 – and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.”
“There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.”
“When everything is for ‘fun’ nothing is for the good.”
“Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don’t ignore feelings and emotions.”
“Writing in a strict form can surprise you.”
“Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.”
“Have you ever heard of a pianist who never had to practice – or of an architect who didn’t bother to find out why buildings stand up?”
“Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.”
“Looking back at it now, any objective account of my life is bound to read like a cross between ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and a travel brochure.”
“I’ve cancelled all my subscriptions to poetry magazines. I prefer to read the ‘New Scientist.’”
“I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don’t at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry.”
“I never wanted to be a pop star.”
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