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One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

Poets are like the decathletes of literature.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

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

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

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