Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.
I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.
I've always thought that the balance between the side of my mind that knows what it is doing and the side that really hasn't got a clue has to be carefully maintained because if you write too knowingly then you get chilly, and if you write too unknowingly you write bollocks that nobody else can understand.
I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.
I'm also a great believer in the dream life; that while we're asleep, a deep subconscious connection is made about our profoundest fears, hopes, loves, losses, dreads and desires.
I'm not much given to making shamanistic remarks about all this, but I'm a great believer in the dream life. If I can carry without spilling whatever it is that drips into my head in the night to my desk, then that's valuable.
I'm an early bird, partly because I like to have some quiet time and partly because by 9am emails begin arriving, the phone starts ringing and I have dragons to kill of one sort or another.
Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.
Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.
If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
