Lady Gregory Quotes

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

Being Irish, I always had this love of words.

To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.

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

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

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

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

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

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.

I am very fond of the people, landscape, poetry, music, history and the Guinness. Being there makes me think of my mother and my grandmother - always sentimental and warm thoughts.

Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.

Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source, The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

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

Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.

Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.