For this creating to take place (as it does from time to time) words have to be accepted as heirs of their forebears, as we are of ours. And in each … - Geoffrey Hill

I think men and women who write poetry or write music or paint are finally responsible for what they do. They are entitled to praise for any success they achieve and they should not complain of just criticism.

It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.

The years will not
answer for what they have done, that much is
certain. There is no shaking them, we
might have foreseen this but refused.