I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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