That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.
I do a lot of readings.
I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.
It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.
Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
