Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
I both admired my father and his writing, and I saw how much he valued it.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
In my early 20s, I was a big fan of Theodore Dreiser and might be one of the few people on the planet who have voluntarily read all his novels.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.
I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.