However I learned something. I thought that if the young person the student has poetry in him or her to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

And if they haven't got poetry in them there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things which ponders listens penetrates where the earlier less developed consciousness passed lightly by is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether the trick they miss is that being called this thing with the weight of tradition behind it and with the association of the Royal family does allow you to have conversations and to open doors and wallets for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

Poetry isn't a profession it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.

In the language of poetry where every word is weighed nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all not a single existence not anyone's existence in this world.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Traditional matter must be glorified since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things the listeners we must remember needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that for a minute the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

While also importantly not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone but everyone should have the choice.

Poetry is rather an approach to things to life than it is typographical production.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful impressive and widely effective mode of saying things.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen but rarely what the poet wants.

When I was in college I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic there is mystery in it not to be explained but admired.

If a poem is not memorable there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.