Quote collection
33 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet."
"Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly."
"Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms."
"The sea is as near as we come to another world."
"A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties."
"I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since."
"There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five."
"There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic."
"I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless."
"I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were."
"I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art."
"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."
"Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally."
"I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century."
"I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas."
"My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do."
"Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions."
"Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry."
"You've got criminal courts and child welfare officials refusing to do their jobs and protect children so they can shift the cases over to family court where predatory professionals can turn a dirty buck off the atrocities committed against children."
"You sleep with a dream of summer weather, wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain. Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence. The mountains have had the sense to disappear. It's the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse. Glory rising like a curtain over distant water. Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark, docks in a pool of shadow all its own. That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck. Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on."