Journalists, as a rule, don't like serious writers, whose existence is a reminder of standards they prefer to forget.

Is that really what the art of poetry has come down to - a typographic convention, allowing a certain class of essayist to be classified as a poet? ... Perhaps it is time we all came off it and decided to call verse verse and prose prose.

Art has always sought to contain chaos and failure in a tensile web of the ordered and the achieved.

Gifted young artists are being ruined by the all-pervading impression that art is easy.

Verse is to prose as dancing is to walking; a ballerina in performance is not trying to make you think that this is her normal way of walking down a street. She is moving in a controlled rhythmic, stylized way so as to transform the natural movements of her body into an instrument of communication. In the same way the poet uses the natural power of language to form an instrument of total communication.