You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.
And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.