I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.
Category Archive: June 20
Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning.
I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.
In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.
These three movements were born spontaneously and independently of the initiative of a few French patriots who had a place in the old political groups and parties.
What I try to do is to go into a poem – and one writes them, of course, poem by poem – to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it’s going to end up.
I met Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley on the same day in 1968. I was sixteen at the time. Very exciting. They were reading at Armagh. One of my teachers brought me to meet them, introduced me, and I became friends with them.
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.
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.