The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.
I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you'd expect, huh?
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.
More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.
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.
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
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.
My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
