Edna O’Brien:
He would never relinquish the anger that he felt then, revolt at the sight of the grey block of Trinity College “set heavily in the city’s ignorance,” or the statue of Thomas Moore, the national poet, covered in vermin. Even the guileless flower girl entreating him to buy flowers exasperated him and reinforced his fury over his own poverty. No Proustian madeleine would summon up this rigorous landscape. For him, as Auden would say of Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
