I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of ….

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral..

Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do..

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the sit….

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliatio….

Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as fro….

"Love" is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like "move". The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which….

I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon..

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But ….

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you d….

The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: "lane" rhymes with "pain", but it also rhy….

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nu….

An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of vari….

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done..

Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to….

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem..

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English langua….

Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash….

Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations ….

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint..

When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about.….