Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.
In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
There was a kind of madness in the country. Eamon De Valera, the prime minister, had this vision of an Ireland where we'd all be in some kind of native costume - which doesn't exist - and we'd be dancing at the crossroads, babbling away in Gaelic, going to Mass, everyone virginal and pure.
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.
Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.