News at Eleven: 'My definition of "poetry",'

he [Ted Hughes] writes, with characteristic generosity, to a student who had sent him a few questions, 'almost excludes anything coming from the ego under the ego's control . . . my whole writing career sometimes presents itself to me as a search for not one style in particular, but the style for this crisis or that.' The poet is not in search of a 'voice', or a position, or indeed a career; he is in search of a survival kit, of words that because they get him through get through to other people.

from The Guardian: The truth, the whole truth

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