“There is much poetry for which most of us do not care, but with a little trouble when we are young we may find one or two poets whose poetry, if we get to know it well, will mean very much to us and become part of ourselves…”

“It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble, it's the things we do know that just ain't so.”

“One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected…There is so much history that we have not validated.”

“We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”

“Genuine poetry reminds us how little we truly know, it is a vehicle for discovery, not a conduit for omniscience.”

“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”

“Asking poetry to fulfil a (merely) political function would be a mistake. This tends to lead us to poetry that, however cleverly or inventively, can do no better than denounce the apparently evil and/or praise the good. Worse, we get something that is very much in fashion right now: the fetishisation and weaponisation of our own pain.…”

“He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry — it is he who is a poet.”

“Most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don't examine or question. We bring these assumptions to the table with us as a given. They are so much a part of who we are that it is difficult for us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions, we think from them.”