Seamus Heaney

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

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

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.

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

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

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

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