Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

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

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

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