Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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.
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.
I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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.
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?
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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.
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.
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.'
I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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