Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.
I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.
It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer.
I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
I think that what's happening today, with all the young poets rushing from one college to another, lecturing at the drop of a hat and so on, is not too good; I think it might have a bad effect on a great many of the young poets. They - to quote Mark Twain - "swap juices" a little too much, so that they are in danger of losing their own identity and don't give themselves time enough in which to work out what's really of importance to them - they're too busy.
I was more worn out with the "Odyssey" than it was with the "Iliad." I mean, just comparing those two - you can see how it's changing, how the language of the "Iliad" is somehow monstrously new - and that language of the "Odyssey" is more comfortable, even for us.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
