In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. – Seamus Heaney
The completely solitary self: thats where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. – Seamus Heaney
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost. – Seamus Heaney
So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and… Wanda Sykes and John Legend… were adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And thats the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship. – Henry Louis Gates