Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.