13 Quotes by Austin Clarke

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.