“I really find listening to and reading the work of lyricists and songwriters as essential to my work as reading poetry itself. It is all poetry.”

“Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.”

“When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.”

“I read poetry to save time.”

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”

“Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.”

“In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction”

“A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is, and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively.”

“Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.”

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”