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There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

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.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.