The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.