How many people know that the best living Scottish poet, by a whole head and shoulders, after the two major figures in this century, Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid, is not any of the English writing pocts, but Sorley MacLean? Yet he alone takes his place easily and indubitably beside these two major poets: and he writes only in Gaelic [...] That Sorley MacLean is a great poet in the Gaelic tradition, a man not merely for time, but for eternity, I have no doubt whatever [...] If MacLean is not a major poet, then I do not know what major poetry is.

The best poetry written in our generation in the British Isles has been in Scottish Gaelic, by Sorley MacLean.

Although MacLean was very much cast as a representative of Gaelic Scotland when his writing was rediscovered and justly celebrated in the 1980s and afterwards, the resulting mix is comparatively unGaelic, elitist rather then populist, and permeable only with difficulty to the community which uses the language in its day to day existence.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

MacLean's voice had a certain bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured.

The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts.He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling.

The poet faces his heart, his soul and his mood.

The modern poet is above all things honest. He does not write for fame nor for money. He merely writes to vent his own spleen, his own bitterness. His own sense of disparity between the ugliness of the world that is and the beauty of the world that might be.

The poet is a particular kind of expert.

His background is not simply the Abbey School of Dunfermline (where he is reputed to have been a schoolmaster), but the surrounding Scottish countryside and community to which he belonged. His wisdom – and his poems are very wise about life – evidently came from his having lived long and profoundly as a member of that whole Scottish community.

Poetry is a highly visible art in Ireland ; in our rapidly secularised society, it has become a kind of erzatz religion, applying the elevated ceremonial language without the divisive doctrine.

Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.