summoning of the energies of words

 

"Two quotations keep going through my mind these days, both from Shakespeare:

how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea

Whose action is no stronget than a flower?

and then these lines from Timons of Athens where a poet talks about the process of writing, lines that have become a touchstone for me:

Our poesy is as a gum which oozes

From whence 'tis nourished.

On the one hand, poetry is secret and natural, on the other hand it must make its way in a world that is public and brutal..."

. . .

"...Grove and park, they do not reach me as a fibre from a tap-root but remind me of the intricate and various foliage of history and culture that I grew up beneath...

Certainly the secret of being a poet, Irish or otherwise, lies in summoning of the energies of words. But my quest for definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of the landscape I was born into. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading. I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awarenesses nourished on English as consonants. My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience."

-- Seamus Heaney