I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
I don't want to bury anything in poetry.
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.