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

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

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.