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.

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

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.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

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