Rumi who is one of the greatest Persian poets said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

Young poets bewail the passing of love old poets the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

And if we must educate our poets and artists in science we must educate our masters labour and capital in art.

Science is not addressed to poets.

Well we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.

The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers its poets and its artists.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things but to me they're more visual than oral and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets how they've used tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry I can do that.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and yes read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Children can write poetry and then unless they're poets they stop when reach puberty.

There is poetry even in prose in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets workshop poets promising poets lovesick poets university poets and a few real poets.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Written poetry is worth reading once and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.