I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.
I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?
It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.
Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.
It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about (That is, when you are young).
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first.
If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
No one can tear your thread out of himself. No one can tie you down or set you free.
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
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