A Quote by W. H. Auden

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. — © W. H. Auden
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Many other cultures value poetry more than we do. In Ireland, poetry is a top cultural pursuit, the art to end all arts.
I'd be on stage in Ireland performing for thousands of people and just not believing in what I'm doing at all. And it hurt, it hurt badly. I knew every day that I couldn't continue this way.
In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.
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.
The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.
All my life, people have asked me what I was so mad about. 'Why you so mad?' And I was never mad. I'm not mad, I just look mad.
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
I mean Ireland, in all honesty I owe Ireland a lot because I think, and I'm not just saying this flippantly, Ireland is probably the reason that I do the job I do because when I started doing stand-up I came to Ireland and I just sort of gelled with the idea of doing it the way I do - telling stories.
Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air round him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone ho loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.
I'm sure I've all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.
For the young Gaels of Ireland Are the lads that drive me mad, For half their words need footnotes And half their rhymes are bad.
I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.
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