Quote

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

I think dreams can come true, but not necessarily like fairy-tales. It's not always so perfect like that.

Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

If you think of all the enduring stories in the world, they're of journeys. Whether it's 'Don Quixote' or 'Ulysses,' there's always this sense of a quest - of a person going away to be tested, and coming back.

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.