Poet

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I've been in the habit of helping people.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

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.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.