Pastoral Resources

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

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

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.

People can put their best poems straight onto the web.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.