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Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.