Walk on air against your better judgement.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.