I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEYNowadays, 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
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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The end of art is peace.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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