Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth to learn how to do that to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

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.

Science is for those who learn poetry is for those who know.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching I think.

From what the moderns want we must learn what poetry should become from what the ancients did what poetry must be.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.