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I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.