Vernon Scannell

"You can find out far more about a writer from his poems or fiction ..because in his stories or poems, his preoccupations, obsessions, moral standards, the quality of his intelligence, his loves, hates…"

"Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged... poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which …"

"A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a kn…"

"The great artist may be, outside the confines of his art, cruel, weak, arrogant and foolish, but within them he can transcend his own condition and become noble, passionate and truthful beyond the ran…"

"I'm no novelist.Or anything else, I suppose, except, just possibly a poet, once in a while."

"The poet , absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows."

"Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the sha…"

"The servicemen of the 1939 - 45 war could not be disillusioned because they held not illusions to start with, the most common mood found everywhere was one of dour resolution, skeptical, resigned."