All through his life, of course, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his beliefs. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance court in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolomaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer the reliable citizen’s terms, let him call the tune and make excuses for Yeats. 

‘Well,’ we might say, ‘when he was a youngster in Sligo he heard these stories about fairies from servants in his grandparent’s house; and then when, as a young poet, he sought a badge of identity for his own culture, something that would mark it off from the rest of the English-speaking world, he found this distinctive and sympathetic thing in the magical world view of the country people. It was a conscious counter-culture act against the rationalism and materialism of late Victorian England.’ To which the citizen replies, ‘Anybody who believes in fairies is mad.’

– “Yeats as an Example?” from Preoccupations by Seamus Heaney

“I do know that one of the best incubating times for me and beating out the beats of a poem, is on long drives.  And my wife always knows, because driving on long journeys with the spouse is very stilling.  She sees my fingers on the steering wheel, beating out the thing. That is true.  Many, many poems that I have conceived of and started are in that shut-eyed, well not literally shut-eyed.  But you know how you go 50 miles before you waken up. The car element; that is certainly one trance that is there.  The other is… I have to say, going to this cottage which is an old 19th century gate lodge and it brings me back to that first house, in a way, that I was in because it used to have a latch and the sound of a latch was like the sound of the primal world.  I felt psychologically, physically safe in it.  I felt that my first self was guaranteed by this place.  I always found it conducive to writing.  In fact, so satisfactory, that I almost didn’t need to write. So the car, and the cottage, and now the attic. 

I used to very much like claustrophobic conditions – facing the wall with a low-set ceiling.  In fact in the cottage we had this lovely, old, low ceiling and one of the different attitudes… one of the things that my wife and I disagreed about was she liked the idea of a skylight.  And I said, no, no, no, no, no. Keep the hutch of the hatch down.  So when I was in Harvard one time, and I came back, and I went upstairs in the cottage – ooooh, there was a skylight. Actually, it was a tremendous change for me and it was something to do with getting near fifty, I think.  I lifted up my eyes to the heavens and… I have a light in my attic at home  – a door into the dark; a door into the light is what we’re after now. 

….I used to find chain smoking very helpful, actually. I’m sure many writers in the room have stopped smoking and there’s a crisis.”

–Seamus Heaney, in an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll.

For more: “Readings & Conversations: Seamus Heaney with Dennis O’Driscoll“