Quotes…

Battles have been lost, but a war remains to be won. The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant
and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life (poetry is a great lubricant) and the rigor mortis of
archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but
they have contributed to that possible life, or to the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is
itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics – of people talking to each
other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have had
darkness enough, God knows, for a long time.

Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth-Century Studies 4 (1970