Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Fiction will always be my greatest love with poetry close behind.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop as it were.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

Well I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.