Poets From Northern Ireland

"I know that what your city has done in the war that is past, it shall do again in the war that has already arrived and has still to be won in the future. It is an onerous responsibility. Yet it is a matter of personal pride and happiness that this responsibility is to be borne by the people of the city I first came to know during the war at the Combined Naval and Air Headquarters at Magee College and that I have visited regularly ever since. It is here, where fashion and fads are treated with amusement and contempt, here, in a society that is rooted in tradition and continuity, that one can have a sense of the links between the human struggle and the eternal verities. Without that abiding sense of continuity, men would become little better than the flies of a summer. With that as a treasured element of our patrimony, we become actors in a great drama, a story that ends in a world beyond our own and for which our own is an immense and glorious preparation. God is the goal of our history; our history is the preserve of the God-fearing, the brave, the chivalric, the courteous, the humble."

"Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it."

"We would be strangers in the Capitol; this is our country also, no-where else; and we shall not be outcast on the world."

"I'm an Ulsterman, of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I'm an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am British. The British archipelago consists of offshore islands to the continent of Europe, so I'm European. This is my hierarchy of values and so far as I am concerned, anyone who omits one step in that sequence of values is falsifying the situation."

"The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away."

"Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini."

"If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride."

"Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect."

"Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed."

"Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured."

"History says don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells."

"Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."

"My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination."

"The writing of certain poems took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled. [...] The Troubles, you might say, had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems ["The Guttural Muse" and others] arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring."

"I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along."

"Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again."

"I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing."

"Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised My passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen."

"Don't be afraid."

"A poet for whom sound is crucial, who relishes the way words and consonants knock around together."

"Heaney has the rare capacity to improvise sentences which are at once spontaneous and shapely, play and profound, beautiful and true."

"För ett författarskap av lyrisk skönhet och etiskt djup, som lyfter fram vardagens mirakler och det levande förflutna."

"I didn’t find the voices in published literature in Australia that could show me the way...Heaney felt like a mentor I wish I had while I was trying to write."

"The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."

"God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure."

"Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils From Bonehill Fields came Bunyan and Blake: "Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen; Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake.""

"Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go."

"If the term “poet's poet” means a poet whose virtuosity can be fully appreciated only by other poets, it may be applied to MacNeice. But if it were taken to imply that his work cannot be enjoyed by the larger public of poetry readers, the term would be misleading. He had the Irishman's unfailing ear for the music of verse, and he never published a line that is not good reading. I am very proud of having published the first volume he had to offer after coming down from the university."

"The elegance in MacNeice's poetry is more one of sensuality now and less one of ingenuity, and the poems he is writing are the experiences of a lonely contemplative person, occupied with himself and with the world we share."

"The difference between loneliness and mere solitariness, after all, is that the lonely sensibility wants to be otherwise. There is a reaching out that never quite touches. In MacNeice’s best work, the ingeniousness and inevitable failure of that reaching indicates the depth of the longing. He is a superb love poet, for instance, yet his love poems often foreground their own ephemerality, like ice sculptures in the summertime."

"O early one morning I walked out like Agag, Early one morning to walk through the fire Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire."

"I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words When they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, My treason engendered by traitors beyond me, My life when they murder by means of my Hands, my death when they live me."

"I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the clubfooted ghoul come near me."

"Though patriotism includes a sentimental, as it were a family, feeling for place, we can distinguish the ethical motive from the sentimental. At certain times in certain countries there has been a moral urgency to be patriotic when the actual or ideal policy of a man’s nation has been a sine qua non for his conscience. But to-day patriotism, in so far as it means subordination to a specifically national policy, is superannuated. This war, we assume, is not being fought-not by most of us-for any merely national end; we are fighting it, primarily and clearly, for our lives, and secondarily, and, alas! vaguely, for a new international order."

"Some on commission, some for the love of learning, Some because they have nothing better to do Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden The drumming of the demon in their ears."

"In my own prejudice ... I would have of a poet ... whose worlds would not be too esoteric ... fond of talking ... capable of pity and laughter ... appreciative of women ... involved in personal relationships ... susceptible to physical impressions..."

"Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled To competition and graft, Exploited in subservience but not allegiance To an utterly lost and daft System that gives a few at fancy prices Their fancy lives, While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet Must wash the grease of ages off the knives."

"It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever, But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather."

"It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi."