No what I should really like to do right now in the full blaze of lights before this illustrious assembly is to shower every one of you with gifts with flowers with offerings of poetry - to be young once more to ride on the crest of the wave.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I've always written all my life and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

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.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals but even as I withdrew into this reading I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

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.

When I was younger I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.