Things i can relate to
Does your innate scepticism intensify doubts about presuming to pursue a life in poetry?
You could say that every poem I write - or that anybody else writes, for that matter - is a way of overcoming those doubts. Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. I used to think that, if you came from a background like mine, your approach to the muse was shyer than if you came from a more bookish or artistic family, but now I'm not so sure. Yeats had an artist daddy, Eliot had a poetry-writing mammy, and that was a great help to them. But what about Elizabeth Bishop or Plath? Or Kavanagh? Or Pessoa? You could argue that scepticism about literature is what actually inspired Pessoa.
Seamus Heaney
You could say that every poem I write - or that anybody else writes, for that matter - is a way of overcoming those doubts. Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. I used to think that, if you came from a background like mine, your approach to the muse was shyer than if you came from a more bookish or artistic family, but now I'm not so sure. Yeats had an artist daddy, Eliot had a poetry-writing mammy, and that was a great help to them. But what about Elizabeth Bishop or Plath? Or Kavanagh? Or Pessoa? You could argue that scepticism about literature is what actually inspired Pessoa.
Seamus Heaney
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