It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
SEAMUS HEANEY