Quotes from Austin Clarke

Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.

It takes us many years to learn that the passion for justice and the welfare of all, once it has been aroused, is the deepest one in moral life.

In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.

Moral training in Ireland is severe and lasts until marriage. Even in childhood, we are taught by the pious clergy to battle against bad thoughts so that we may preserve our holy purity.

Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title.

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.

Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free.

But on those Friday afternoons, ambition did not spread its wings to embrace the study of medicine. We all wanted to be masters like our teachers. Their life appeared to be so enjoyable. All they had to do was learn the lessons set, by heart, and sit and hear boys repeat them by rote.

When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place.

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

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.

Assonance is not the enemy of rhyme. It helps us to respect rhyme, which has been spoiled by mechanical use.

In contrast to our sinking taste, there has been a revival of interest in verse drama in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. The movement has been slow but sure and, above all, modest in its demands.

In expressing so completely his own type, Mr. Yeats presents us with the case for integrity. If we can express eventually our own scholastic mentality in verse, I believe that our art will lead us not towards, but away from, English art.