A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our senses are sharpened and we register much more than usual - a striking face or hair-do, the wind's behaviour, a bird singing.

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.