"Language is at the heart of poetry and it is difficult to commandeer words which elicit no personal echo . Of what we can speak, we need not be silent."

Dennis O'Driscoll Literature See all quotes by Dennis O'Driscoll →

React to this quote

More by Dennis O'Driscoll

“'Breviary example of O'Driscoll ' brief poems”

“Writers are not neccessarily articulate simply because poetry is their stock-in-trade.”

“Everybody has certain preoccupations they return to.What looks like an obsession, is often something more modest, namely a return to the fray through a somewhat different angle of vision..from a different stage of your experience.”

“Even the Revenue is better loved by the twenty first century Irish natives than were the English colonists who ruled from Dublin Castle in earlier centuries.”

“If poets spoke their poetry , they would not need to write it.”

“I put all my poetry in long hand, try to let the idea marinate as long as possible, clinging to the commonplace notion of a creative connection between the movement of the hand and the flow of imagination.”

Resonant Thoughts

"After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a gre…"

— H. Rider Haggard

Literature1856–1925

#writing

"In an article published in The Monist for January, 1891, I endeavored to show what ideas ought to form the warp of a system of philosophy, and particularly emphasized that of absolute chance. In the n…"

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Mathematics1839–1914

#mind

"Our words have deep strong roots, and will never be eradicated with a pistol. There will be no better result from using a pistol than bloodshed. Say and write whatever you like, we will never be offen…"

— Ahmad Kasravi

Law1890–1946

#writing

"I'm a songwriter first, have always been, and probably always will be. Making the demo is a natural product of writing a song; after that, I'm happy to hear other people do it in other ways."

— Carole King

Music1942

#writing