Colm Tóibín
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I thought that was funny.
Oh yeah, poets in their youth.
Because we have no Wall Street and we've no aristocracy.
And therefore the poets have a great power in the country.
And you can probably change the country by changing the poem.
I worked in Stanford with Yvonne Boland.
And I'd never really met her in Ireland.
Her father had been the ambassador, you know, to the UN and to London.
Her mother was a painter.
She was always beautifully dressed and her hair was always beautiful.
But what she said was, I don't want to be the woman in the poem.
I want to be the woman writing the poem.
And almost just by saying that and then doing it, she did change things.
She was part of that movement of feminism.
But her poems changed things.
Seamus Heaney's poems changed things.