On (Not) Saying What You Mean
Colm Tóibín, 30 November 1995
“... Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature of its structure. Thus a poem could be read in the same way by a student in Kenya, at Oxford, in Philadelphia, in darkest Australia and here in ... ”