Quotes & Sayings About Irish Poets

The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters — Thomas Cahill

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself. — David Starkey

[on the Irish] A race of poets and wordsmiths, my ass. — M. Edward McNally

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest. — Tobias Hill

Irish poets, learn your trade,
sing whatever is well made,
scorn the sort now growing up
all out of shape from toe to top. — W.B.Yeats

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. — Oscar Wilde

Irish improves a poet. — Sina Queyras

What I told you tonight - it isn't my story alone. It belongs to every Irish person living and dead. And every Irish person living and dead belongs to it. And to all the story of Ireland; blood and bones, legends, guns and dreams, Catholics, Protestants, England, horses and poets and lovers. — Frank Delaney

We survive. We're Irish. We have the souls of poets. We love our misery, we delight in the beauty of strange places and dark places in our hearts. — Eilis Flynn

Without artists, would this heritage have descended to us? Would the words and deeds - the revelation - have survived the arduous journey into the present without the painters, the mosaic workers, the storytellers, the stone carvers, the poets, the singers, the workers in stained glass? Wasn't it art, I thought - as I watched Bernard open a handsome black wallet and remove a handful of lire - that had been the carrier of the divine? Popes had understood that. The Emperor Constantine. Monks in damp Irish monasteries illuminating the Word. — Rachel Pastan