Poets From Ireland

"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot."

"The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it."

"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman."

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul."

"I guess as a minority person in America, and with a lot of perceptions that English is not my language, there is a lot of leaving me out of this culture. So a lot of my work is appropriation. I'm going to appropriate this job and these books and this language-the American language. I'm going to appropriate this country. So a lot of the allusions are to say that the Joycean soul, this Rilkean romantic poetic soul, is mine. But the way that you're all talking, it seems like I put those allusions out there to give you pain and trouble. I meant them to be fun; that was my whole point. Maybe the greatest joy of my life is to read. I love it, it's pleasurable, it's sensual. So the allusions were just my playing with my books, you know."

"To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor."

"I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul."

"The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove."

"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end."

"Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence."

"My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?"

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine."

"I want to achieve myself—little or great as I may be—for I know that there is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris."

"Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life."

"Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state."

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory."

"I would offer James Joyce as an example of an extremely interesting but enormously overrated writer who really had I very little influence on anybody because nobody can write like Joyce. Who would want to? Whereas Virginia Woolf, his exact contemporary of course, has been enormously influential, and underrated because she's not in the canon. She's in some people's canon, but she's not in the canon."

"In my conversation I make literary references all the time and in my head I make them even more I can hear Joyce and Shakespeare and Rilke. So why can't I use this in my writing? It's such a delight. It makes me really sad when there are so many readers who think it is off-putting to do allusions like that."

"Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."

"I regard the two major male archetypes in 20th Century literature as Leopold Bloom and Hannibal Lecter. M.D. Bloom, the perpetual victim, the kind and gentle fellow who finishes last, represented an astonishing breakthrough to new levels of realism in the novel, and also symbolized the view of humanity that hardly anybody could deny c. 1900-1950. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim. Bloom, exploited and downtrodden by the Brits for being Irish and rejected by many of the Irish for being Jewish, does indeed epiphanize humanity in the first half of the 20th Century. And he remains a nice guy despite everything that happens..."

"[T]here were a lot of Americans, headed by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute gibberish. Then they hired a poor dotty Irishman called James Joyce, if you’ve heard about him - he was thought to be a great influence in my youth - and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books - only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge... [Y]ou could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder - but that was before the Americans hired him. And then they hired him to write Finnegan’s Wake, which is gibberish."

"In English, you cannot even turn around a phrase or leave a dangling participle. Joyce needed to explode the English language to allow its occult meaning to emerge; Cortázar just plays around with Spanish words and grammar for the same purpose."

"And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up around his navel. None of that for me, thanks."

"Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear."

"The classical things are really quite marvelous, you know. It's just they have degenerated into a kind of "well-made-story" of our time. But you could learn forever from them...I get to one of Joyce's stories. So simple. So... so much happening in them to ordinary people."

"I really admired "Dubliners" a lot."

"Give me, give me God's own country! there to live and there to die,"

"God of Nations, at thy feet, In thy bonds of love we meet, Hear our voices, we entreat, God defend our free land. Guard Pacific's triple star From the shafts of strife and war, Make her presence heard afar, God Defend New Zealand!"

"All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?"

"I know what wages beauty gives, How hard a life her servant lives, Yet praise the winters gone: There is not a fool can call me friend, And I may dine at journey’s end With Landor and with Donne."

"I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My county is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death."

"I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved Or boyish intellect approved, With some appropriate commentary on each; Until imagination brought A fitter welcome; but a thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech."

"Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out Because the work had finished in that flare. Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, As ’twere all life’s epitome. What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?"

"Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old."

"The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky."

"I would be ignorant as the dawn That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses; I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw — Ignorant and wanton as the dawn."

"I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there’s more enterprise In walking naked."

"Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, And all their helms of Silver hovering side by side, And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor."

"Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours’ eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult."

"Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave."

"While I, that reed-throated whisperer Who comes at need, although not now as once A clear articulation in the air, But inwardly, surmise companions Beyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof —Ben Jonson’s phrase—and find when June is come At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof A sterner conscience and a friendlier home, I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me —Seeing that Fame has perished that long while, Being but a part of ancient ceremony— Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile."

"Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end."

"O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon."

"Barriers dissolve, too, when confronted by the Eastern poems: the poems of the sacred books, in Yeats' translation of the Upanishads, or Isherwood's of the Bhagavad-Gita, and such work as E. Powys Mathers' Black Marigolds and Robert Payne's The White Pony, a rich anthology of Chinese poetry."

"I was easily entranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying: and any poet who mixes the poetry of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say. In my student years, it was Yeats who seemed to do this better than anyone else. There were lines of Yeats that were to ring in my head for years: "Many times man lives and dies/Between his two eternities,/That of race and that of soul,/And ancient Ireland knew it all..../Did she in touching that lone wing/Recall the years before her mind/Became a bitter, an abstract thing/Her thought some popular enmity:/Blind and leader of the blind/Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?" I could hazard the guess that all the most impassioned, seductive arguments against the artist's involvement in politics can be found in Yeats. It was this dialogue between art and politics that excited me in his work, along with the sound of his language-never his elaborate mythological systems. I know I learned two things from his poetry, and those two things were at war with each other. One was that poetry can root itself in politics. Even if it defends privilege, even if it deplores political rebellion and revolution, it can, may have to, account for itself politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language. The other, that politics leads to "bitterness" and "abstractness" of mind. makes women shrill and hysterical, and is finally a waste of beauty and talent: "Too long a sacrifice / can make a stone of the heart." There was absolutely nothing in the literary canon I knew to counter the second idea. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's anti-slavery and feminist poetry, H.D.'s anti-war and woman-identified poetry, like the radical-yes, revolutionary-work of Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser, were still buried by the academic literary canon. But the first idea was extremely important to me: a poet-one who was apparently certified-could actually write about political themes, could weave the names of political activists into a poem: "MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connally and Pearce/Now and in time to come/Wherever green is worn/Are changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.""