In the world of poetry there are would-be poets workshop poets promising poets lovesick poets university poets and a few real poets.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Written poetry is worth reading once and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

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.

Poetry is the work of poets not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry but a kind of instinct or inspiration such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.