“For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.”

“The unit of significance in the poem is not the word but the phrase or sentence…a poet should consider the effect of the whole poem, not its local felicities.”

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

“The writing of certain poems (eg 'The Guttural Muse and others)took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled, you might say I had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring.”

“Poem me no poems.”

“When the mind has grasped the matter, words come like flowers at the call of spring.”

“A poem might begin for me from a rhythmical phrase without words but with an an emotional / tonal pitch or colour which will announce itself. Other times I' ll just become obsessed by something.. hoping that eventually it will speak to me in English.”

“When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.”

“A living poem" had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.”

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”