Austin Clarke Quotes

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).

O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.

The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.

Yeats regarded his work as the close of an epoch, and the least of his later lyrics brings the sense of a great occasion. English critics have tried to claim him for their tradition, but, heard closely, his later music has that tremulous lyrical undertone which can be found in the Anglo-Irish eloquence of the eighteenth century.

The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.

Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate... When in eternal lines to time thou growst So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

I went to a French school, so we didn't study Bram Stoker there. I just thought it was a genius thing.