Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion

When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.

Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adiga

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

Ben Whishaw
Ben Whishaw

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

Brenda Hillman
Brenda Hillman

I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Stevens, Duncan and Barbara Guest - and many living poets as well.

Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Kizer

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Irving Layton
Irving Layton

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

James Fenton
James Fenton

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.