The artist finds, that the more he can confine his attention to a particular part of any work, his productions are the more perfect, and grow under his hands in the greater quantities.
Category Archive: June 20
Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.
Of course, you can’t legislate for how people are going to read.
Like the winds that we come we know not whence and blow whither soever they list, the forces of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin. They arise before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not the speculations of men.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.